Sharing Information

I am a geek.  As such, I have a tendency to over-engineer solutions, especially when it comes to solving personal challenges.  And while I may be able to make my ‘solutions’ work, my family sometimes finds them difficult/frustrating/impossible to live with.  This is the story of how I made data sharing work in my home.

The Problem

I have a corporate laptop.  I also have a home desktop system.  I need to be able to easily move files between them – mostly personal documents and media.  Some of the files are rather large.  Thumb drives are inconvenient.  And since I have a home network, using anything other than the network to move these files just feels wrong.

I also need to share things with my family.  My wife has a home desktop system and a laptop as well.  The kids each have a desktop system (hand-me-downs).  And when someone creates a document they want the others to have access to, we need a way to do it easily.

Then there are the friends and family that come by.  Many use the WiFi network.  Then we want to share pictures (without cutting them down to nibs or posting them to a public area like Facebook).  And again, we want it to be easy.

Of course, I also have tax records and other documents that, while I would like to store them centrally for easy access, I have a real need to secure.  Sorry, I don’t trust the WiFi security for much.