Network Attached Storage (NAS) Comes Home
These days it is not uncommon for home networks to rival the business networks of 10 years ago. Rather than having the family computer that everyone has to share, people may have more than one desktop, a laptop or two, tablets, and smartphones. This can make finding files hard... they are saved in local folders by default, so if you created, say, an address list for mail merges on your laptop, but then need to refer to it later while on your desktop, it is not available. How can you make this work better? You could set up a machine to serve as a file server (using something like a Windows HomeGroup , or more basic NTFS or SMB shares) and use it as a repository for your files. This works well, but it can be complicated to set up and maintain, and the files may not be accessible to all your devices. Using a cloud-based service such as SkyDrive also works, but there is still an accessibility question and you can lose access to files if your Internet connection goes down. A better so