I'm currently a senior in high school, I plan on going away to college in the fall. As the house geek, I manage my parents and sister's computers. With me away at college, I'd like to know all of their data is safe. I'd also like to access all of my data from college, in addition to having proxy just in case. I know there's all types of information on NAS's; however most pages that I've found appear to be at least two years old, times have changed. I would really like to build a NAS (for as little money as possible), my major requirements: SMB, FTP, SSH, proxy, hamachi, VNC, 1-2 TB, RAID 5, and low power. I've barely started the hardware search, I'm thinking about a mini-ATX case (of the cube variety) with a 3 HDD hot-swappable rack. I haven't put much thought into a RAID card, motherboard, or PSU. My main concern right now is software. I'm experimenting in a virtual machine with RESTORE-EE. It seems pretty cool for backups since it grabs the files, however I haven't found where it puts the files it backs up. Does anyone know? Documentation on RESTORE-EE is slim. I also liked FreeNAS, but haven't yet downloaded it and put it in a virtual machine. Does FreeNAS have a GUI? Is there a package manager (like synaptic) that would make installing the required programs easier? Any tips, suggestions, or articles will help.
Yes, it does have a GUI - see http://www.howtoforge.com/network_attached_storage_with_freenas You could also try Openfiler, SME Server (see http://www.howtoforge.com/fileserver_with_sme_server7.1 ) or maybe even eBox (although I'm not sure about its RAID capabilities).
