As I say constantly, “The three most important maintenance task on your computer are, backup, backup and backup.” You can always restore your software or replace your computer in a worst case scenario. What you can’t do or can’t do easily is recover your data. This is what you want to spend most of effort doing. I’ve mentioned to online backup solutions I like. What I’m now going to talk about is getting a backup locally(At your home or workplace). The advantage of this is it’s quicker to restore your data when it becomes necessary to do so. This by no means replaces the the off-site backup. It is just faster and more convenient.
You can build a home server or NAS (Network Attached Storage) with any old Pentium 4 class computer you have laying around. Besides the P4 you need a 500GB or more harddrive. At least 512MB of RAM is prefered. I do not have a spare drive around and later I’m planning to make this RAID5 so I am buying a 4 port SATA card and new 1 terabyte drive from NewEgg. Later I will buy the 2 or 3 additional drives I need to set up the RAID5.
After you gather the hardware you need to download FreeNAS and burn the image file to a CD. FreeNAS is free and open-source software that will turn your computer into a NAS.
So you have your Pentium 4 computer with 512MB RAM. You have a 500GB or more hardrive and you’ve downloaded FreeNAS. I will not explain how to put the parts together. If you don’t know how to do that you should not be doing this project. Now you are ready to begin.
