hi i'm new to this but i need help, i couldn't find anything i was looking for in other forums but i recently bought a lap top for business and i want to have a wireless hardrive to be able to save and open from each computer. and if possible able to access it online with out having to pay subscription fees. My mom and I do the office work but we work out of our houses and would be a lot easier to just be able to share one hard drive instead of backing up and restoring all the time and waiting to do the work until you have the updated jump drive etc. etc. etc. any help would be appreciated thank you
well i'm cheap so what i would do is: Find a old 550 pentium computer or even a 700 celeron computer (they use little power, dont heat up the room, arent good for anything else, and they are quiet then install a large harddrive then cable it to the router or buy a cheap pci wireless card for it (as low as $8 even) Basically your useing a whole computer as an external drive but with added functions. You'll even be able to add a slave or usb drive when you want to expand. then put a jump drive in your main XP computer and run the set up home network wizard ...put the same jump drive into each computer and double click the loaded program that xp put on it. It'll ask you if you want to turn on printer and file sharing. then when all is said in done you click my networks and you'll see all the shared folders of each computer of your network. the computer name you choose for the out dated one might be BACKUP or something and you'll just save everything to it where all computers can access it another nice thing about it if your router is wireless and you installed a wireless pci card in the old computer is it can be placed out of the way and also be used as a print server by plugging your printers into it. that'll keep your work area clear and printer access can be had to all without leaving a hot running computer on last year 6 low end computers went through my work bench. i never paid for any of them. found half in peoples trash by the road and the rest people just gave them to me. but thats all they are good for these days like i said i'm cheap good luck regards paul
oh i missed the online access turn the low end computer into a server also You'll have to read up on it my son does it all the time it's built into XP (it'll require your xp copy) then all you do is type the ip # in the browser address window and the webpage will come up to upload or download. Requires some html coding. i even find this hard There is a site called RIPWAY i use http://www.ripway.com/ but if your info is sensitive i'd go with ceating your own server. You could encript it using (free) CryptoExpert 2006 Lite http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/security/fwsecuritytools.html before uploading it to RIPWAY (all free) those are my ideas good luck
Zer0ink, you can edit your existing posts with the button on the right hand side, you don't need to post again. Using an old PC is certainly one way of doing this. For local wireless access, all you need do is buy an external hard drive with an ethernet port on it and then connect it to a wireless router. Getting said external box online is somewhat more complex because it means the route that Zer0ink advises is the only real way to do it. You can host files online using web domain based servers, and you can get the simplest of web pages up and running easily enough to be able to access the files but realistically, there is a much simpler way of managaing data like this. Get a large USB drive each, and then work from those. You can easily work out which files need transferring between them so they're kept up to date by looking at the last modified dates of the files on them.
