ORIGINAL: grandpa mojo
I just have over 100 Gigs of material that need to be REMOVED for the time being (off each machine mind you!)
Mojo,
I KNOW this is not what you were looking for but...
If you have THAT MUCH data laying around consider this:
I'll bet you have a spare box laying around somewhere. Stick a Linux distro on it and use it as a fileserver. Here's my logic.
The upside:
It doesn't have to be a flashy box. You could get by with a PIII as long as it has a board that will support modern UDMA
standards or you could use a PCI card for UDMA 100/133. Really the only other thing you need in the box is an ethernet card and
at least 512MB of RAM. Couple hundred GB of drive space, would be nice if the case had enough exansion room for more drives if
you wanted. You could set it up so you can run headless, or use the motherboard's onboard video or a cheap video card with an
old cheap monitor.
Some linux distros are really for tweakers and geeks, others are so easy my mother could install it. Once it's up and running
nothing short of a natural disaster will bring it down.
You can share files with your Windows boxes EASILY with Samba, almost all good linux distros come with it and it's very easy to
set up.
You can toss just about any kind of data on there and it's not going to get mangled. Rarely does a linux distro get its panties
in a wad over MIME types.
You won't believe how fast it is and how quickly you can get to your archived data.
The OS is FREE. And most linux distros are maintained by highly motivated linux evangelists that are constantly improving the
system.
The downside:
If you know nothing about linux then you will have to go with a slightly more bloated distro like Fedora.
You might blow most of a day setting it up if you're in unfamiliar territory.
When I saw how much data you wanted to archive this is where my head went. Then again, I'm a linux geek from way back so it's
probably not what you wanted to hear. Just thought I'd toss it out there...
WC