Hi,
My dad just asked me if I could create somekind of photoserver.
The IDEA is to share our photo's with our family, so I was thinking about somekind of server. It will be mainly used within our house, but my sister should also be able to VIEW and download the photo's from her house. The photo's should be stored on 1 HDD and they should be backuped to an other one.

Now, my big question is:
Do I need to work with a server, or can I simply use a network HDD (if that even exists) and set up a VPN or something.
And how can I do that, I KNOW some about networking, adabting the firewall of PC's and routers to make it work, But I don't know anything about actual sharing HDD over the internet (Safe).

We have a WRT160N router but we mainly use the networkcables.
We have 5 PC's all portables 3vista's and 2 xp. The PC at my sister's house is a Vista (all the vista's are vista home premium and the XP's are XP pro's)

What kind of storage divice would I need? We would like to have a capacity of 1TB (+backup probably 1GB too then )

Thanks in advance

Jonas WautersU r diffident  going to need a VPN. Have to share the HDD and it just keeps going and going. It will be easier just to find some local account on Picaso. Try this link

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?hl=en_US&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Flh%2Flogin%3Fcontinue%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fpicasaweb.google.com%252Fhome&service=lh2&ltmpl=gp&passive=true

Picaso is a web base photo sharing application that U and other family members can upload, download picutes and share them to see. Write back and let us know.Was that ENGLISH Midsail? 

Let's ask this first...

Why do you want to maintain the server yourself? There are plenty of free online options you could try at, as well as some higher end paid systems. Might be a bit more convenient. The problem is that we have an up and download limit in Belgium, so we can't upload and download each photo.
So the idea was to make somekind of main HDD for all the computers in the house so we can store mainly photo's but also other stuff to it. And if my sister would need a photo she could get it off that HDD.

Thanks for the reply anyway. But it's not really a good solution

I've also been thinking of using that same Main HDD (as I like to call it) later to store music and stream it to our stereo as I've read articles of those kind of stereo's

What about something like this?

Jonas