Sharing files over a home network...

I have a 2 year old iMac sitting in my basement.. I use it, and it is currently home to a ton of photos, videos and sound files (Logic as well as itunes). This week I plan on getting a Macbook to tootle with on the main floor (the basement is cold. ;))
I would love to be able to share files (and back them up as well.. kinda a nother issue).
As it stands right now, I have a 250 GB external drive which is backing up the iMac (but has hit it's limit).. need more space.
in addition I have a D-Link DLR 655... great little router. I believe it has Network capability in that I think through something called SharePort it can help you share files across a network.. no idea how.
So, yeah, that's about it.. anyone have any good tips in terms of building out a comprehensive backup system in conjunction with a file sharing capability across two macs (and maybe even a PC or two) across my home network?
Finally, how would that even work.. let's say I have an image on the imac, when I open it on the macbook, would I see it in iPhoto?
Lotsa questions.. thank you so much.
Jay.

Hi
Its not that obvious from the supplied information if you're talking about OSX Server? Perhaps your question might get more attention if you posted here:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=235
Which is the main Leopard Forum. You could also look here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=599
Click 'more options' in the Search field, select All, Last Year and key in 'networking'. Should reveal something? This article might help:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1433
What you're asking is simple enough. Connect all of your nodes (network devices; eg: macs, pcs, printers etc) to a switch or router or combination of the two. Depends on how many nodes you have. Wired (Ethernet) or Wireless will do. Make sure the router is providing IP addresses. Basically is its built-in DHCP Service switched on? By default most of them are. Once that's done and you've verified they can all access the internet, enable File Sharing. System Preferences > Sharing for the Macs and for the PCs right click the 'C' drive > Properties > Sharing.
Backup is a vast subject and its difficult to be concise. A lot depends on your skill set, means, budget and location. You could search this and the XServe/XServe RAID Forums as it has been discussed many times. A basic principle is to make sure you can effectively restore what you backup. Most people forget this when implementing an effective backup strategy. To start you off purchase a large enough external hard drive. Connect to all your macs and simply drag/drop what you want. If you have Leopard use Time Machine. For the PCs use something appropriate. Photos & Music can be transferred from mac to mac by simply enabling the options in the applications themselves. ITunes > Preferences > Sharing: Look for Shared Libraries; Share this Library. When you launch iPhoto hold down the option key. It's fairly obvious after that.
If you double-click on an image presented in the Finder (shared) on one mac then your mac will use whatever application it can find that it thinks can handle the file. For image files that could be Preview or Quicktime or if you have it installed an image editing application such as Photoshop. You can even define which application handles which type of file by control-clicking on the file itself and selecting 'Open With'. This is fairly basic 'how to use your mac' stuff which you should know?
Tony

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Message was edited by: Russell Massey

Hi Henry, and a warm welcome to the forums!
While you may get help or a solution here, It's quite acceptable to start a new topic of your own, certainly feel free to start a new topic to attract more helpers to your particular situation, here's a link if as is often the case, it's hard to find out where to do it...
http://discussions.apple.com/post!default.jspa?forumID=752
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Network Map > http://scubasblog.com/network.jpg
Dell Support Forum with same issue I posted >> http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/network-internet-wireless/f/3324/p/19337620/19716797.asp...

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Checkout SharePoints.

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A mini as a server is a good alternative.. You don't need to run server OS.. but share files to the network. Very hard to build the capacity of the NAS though.
And a Mac Pro is now a joke without internal slots and cages for drives. (nice machine but wrong for this).
And Apple have nothing in between.. a short tower case.. been missing for a long long time.

Sharing media across my home network, in more ways than one...

Hi,
Bear with me, because I can only just get my head around this myself:
I would like to have a network accessible hard drive to which I can store all the photos, music and video in my home. The devices accessing it are a MacBook Pro (10.5.3), a MacBook (10.4.11), and a Sony Playstation 3 (whatever the latest update is).
My home network is working correctly, and everything can connect to each other. I currently use Nullrivers MediaLink software to stream my MacBook Pro's content to the Sony Playstation 3, which works as well as it should. I also have an Airport Express (connects to my home network) connected to some speakers, to which both my MBP and my partners MacBook can stream to (we use Airfoil for other audio).
However, I would like to consolidate all our media onto one device, so that we are using the same iTunes library(1), the same iPhoto library(2), and all of our video is also accessible to both of us. Now I know how I would do this using a plain old network attached storage device, but this wouldn't allow me to stream the media to the Playstation 3, as far as I know - the Playstation 3 needs to have some sort of DLNA protocol to access the data. I'd love to be able to fire up the Playstation 3 and show people photos/videos etc, without first having to turn on my MBP.
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Buffalo's LinkStation Live drives seem reasonably priced, and on paper seem to do everything I would like, but I have been put off by poor reviews, posts on PS3 forums saying they don't work, and also that they are "slow".
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We would not have an issue with not being able to share iTunes store purchases, we do not have very many. We would obviously need to be able to sync our iPods from either of our machines, drawing from the main repository, if thats possible.
The ability to access the shared drive remotely would get bonus points, but is in no way necessary.
(1) We would share the same Library file, so that any changes made by either of us would be reflected on each others iTunes windows. If there are issues with two people accessing the same library at the same time, we probably wouldn't run into them because we rarely use iTunes at the same time. This sounds silly but you know what I mean.
(2) Is this even possible with one of the computers running iPhoto '08 and one running iPhoto '06? This isn't a major issue, music sharing being the main one.
Please Help!!

I decided to keep my old 20" Core Duo iMac as a Server in the bedroom, and now use it as a television and PVR as well. I wouldn't have made much on eBay anyway.

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