I am constantly worried about data loss (and as my friends point out, a little unnecessarily), so I set up a simple file/backup server this weekend with a spare copy of XP Pro I had lying around. You basically just need a low power PC, two hard drives (one for file server, one for backup – in my case a 1TB WD Black and a 2TB WD Green), and an OS (Ubuntu will work, but is much more annoying to set up, so I’d stick to Windows).

1) Install Windows XP (or Vista, or 7, or a server OS, whatever OS you want)

2) Set up users on the “server” PC to match accounts on your other PCs. For example, HTPC is the account on my home theater PC (clever eh?) and I recreated an account on the file server with the same credentials. This allows share permissions to function transparent to the OS/user.

3) Enable blank passwords from accounts in Local Security policy

4) Add whatever shares you want, and give proper access. For shares that will be public, like my pictures, I want to make sure no one could delete them – so I restrict them to read-only. This allows friends to browse the shares when they visit while securing my piece of mind that they don’t accidentally delete something (no offense!).

5) Install some sort of backup solution (I use Syncback Free), and set your jobs up.

That should do it – you now have a simple file server that guests can access, without destroying things, and that backs itself up!

p.s. And when you’re trying to figure out why your end to end gigabit connection is only transferring around 100 megabits, check to see that you didn’t plug something into a 100 megabit port…sigh