Network Setup, how?

[AJ84]

Hi all, need opinions of people who are into their networking and so on.

I'm moving house and was planning ahead (and buying hardware if needed) for the "best" setup.

We have 4 desktop computers all running XP Pro.
We have 4 laptop computers all running XP Pro.
We have 1 shuttle PC which is in the living room connected to the TV. This runs Windows Media Centre 2005 and contains a drive for music/video.

The above are all connected via wireless 54g.

The below are the options possible:-

Option 1:-
To have a dedicated machine running Windows XP Pro. This would make an image of the Media Centre so that music is backed up incase of failure.
This machine could also potentially backup and import the backed up images of the 8 machines too.

Option 2:-
To have a dedicated machine running Windows 2000/Windows 2003 Server. This would be more of a file server where by all 9 machines would grab the files requested from this server. A secondary dedicated machine would then backup this server or there would be some sort of mirroring so that no data is lost in a failure of a hard drive. Users could also then log on on any machine and have access to their own files within their account.

Option 3:-
We carry on running the machines the way they are. All on a wireless network for the internet but indidually have files / documents on the PC. Users would not be able to log onto other machines and have their files visible unless shared on their own machine. No Backups would be made and backing up is up to the machines owner. The media centre would however have an external drive to image and backup the media centres main storage drive.

Option 3 I know how to do and it is pretty much setup. Option 1 is also possible and I know how to do this however... I suspect over wireless, this could be a painful option when backing up each of the 9 machines and copying over to the dedicated machine.
Option 2 is nice however I have no idea how to do this when it comes to Windows 2000/2003 server and its setup.

Any advice on this?

We are also installing a CCTV system whereby the main recorder (HD/DVD) is conneted to the router so that we can access footage wherever we are.


Thanks in advance.

AJ

[ultim8um]

Forget streaming backups of entire hard drives over wireless, it would be easily interupted by normal use and prone to failure (as well as horribly slow if the drive(s) are full or large).

Just use a NAS box with a scheduled file copy operation to backup the new files on the media centre PC. Something like the Thecus N2100 with a pair of mirrored SATA drives would be very nice. Alternatively if thats to expensive or to redundant then the Synology 106E might also be a good bet.

[atrull]

I'd cat5 it up

[KermitTheFrog]

Streaming over wireless can be slow.

However I would suggest option one, as long as you make shares available, then backups can be made to an external harddrive, or DVD burns.

But as Atrull suggests to get the transfer between devices for streaming you should go with wired network.

You could still do option two if you want a domain, but licenses/etc... Also you wouldn't need another machine to backup to, just what I mentioned for option one.

Once all networked you wouldn't need to store anything on the shuttle, as it would be streaming over the network all the files wanted (music and video). So no backup required from the shuttle to the server.