MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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My ibook is getting very full, but not sure i want to go and buy a new laptop at the moment. I am also a bit twitchy about photos and other data that i can't replace if i loose it.
The thought i had was buy an old G4 tower, a couple of big fast disks and try and create a raid.
I assume i could also plug the printer in and leave it permanently on the network?
Is there anything that would stop this working, any better way?
If you're relatively computer savvy, you could try FreeNAS - http://www.freenas.org/
Any old PC (within reason!), network card, couple of big disks and away you go
You can get simple printer sharing devices anyway like... http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4MWV&SearchType=1&SearchTerms=edimax&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=0 ...that'll share appletalk as well... and then solve your storage issues separately by just having any old USB hard drive.
Or... find a standalone NAS, I have a Maxtor one which can also share printers (USB only), plus it can share other USB hard drives connected to it etc. But, being a NAS its much slower of course than connecting to an external USB drive. When I say find one, I can't see that mine supports AppleTalk stuff, but you'll know more about these things.
Personally, I don't use my NAS much, storage wise its too slow for big files, I just use it to pipe things between computers. If I just used desktops with gigabit lan then it might be different but I always run my laptop wireless and only have one other desktop.
Printer server works great though, I have an old laserjet sat on mine in ecosave mode and just press print whenever I want, its never played up once, I could of course move this onto the NAS cos it'll share it too but I bought that afterwards and can't be arsed (plus I like separate things for separate jobs, keeps it simple if something packs up).
Raid on a NAS is a 'bit much' for most people. I've installed a good few NAS drives particluarly the Buffalo Linkstation Pro ones where you can buy the equivalent sized USB hard drive, plug it in and configure it to back up to it every night (mine does it too but I don't use this feature myself). That way, if something goes wrong then I can just pull the USB drive out of it, plug it into my computer and I've got access again, with me. Cheap, easy to understand and practical. (oh... Linkstation Pro is good too cos you can share over the web with FTP if you have a static IP or dynamic dns things or whatever, works great... Maxtor doesn't do that... oh, Linkstation Live shares differently I think, a lot of these devices are using their own dummy's web sharing proprietory stuff, I just don't like the look of things that don't use conventional technologies to get round problems myself.)
So... that's my suggestions, cheap and cheerful really with none of the farting about with an old computer... unless you enjoy that sort of thing!
get a drobo, a mate got one the other week and hasn't shut up raving about it
not the cheapest solution, but it seems to do the trick
Fitted a new HD in an ibook G3 last weekend £50 for 160GB. Cloned the old HD onto the new and then swapped them over. Quite a lot of screws to undo but not difficult. www.ifixit.com have some really good guides.
Apple Time Capsule - not sure if you need to run Time Machine to use it, and so may not be any use to you.
I just bought a 750GB external hard drive for my iMac for £60 from Amazon, partitioned it, and using Time Machine (how good is it?!) with it. Early days, but all going swimmingly so far. Hope it stays that way...