OK, this is too obscure for everyone except for 3 people. Let me explain. We have been vanguards in the digital lifestyle. Many years ago I shared a hard drive inside my desktop to gather files that we all wanted to access. About 4 years after tha I installed a media server (a 
HP Media Vault to be exact) to hold all of our photos, music, movies, applications and anything else that needed to be backed up. As the IT department of our house, I had to change user behavior. Everyone was saving their stuff on their own PCs. Often people had more than one machine (desktop AND notebook). Stuff was everywhere and could never be found.
One of my challenges was to make it easy to understand the idea of network storage. After setting my NAS (Network Accessed Storage) / Media Server I went to each of the machines and attached them to it as drive M: I called it TempHold. I thought the name would be easy to remember and explain. My pitch went like this “put all your music in TempHold in the music folder, put all your pictures in TempHold in the photos folder, put all your documents and school stuff in your own folder in TempHold (named Katie’s Stuff, Sarah’s Stuff . . .) The reward for following this regimen was that your stuff will always be there no matter what machine you are on, AND I will take care of it and back it up.
For the most part, everyone got on board. Soon everyone depended on it and even appreciated the efforts of IT. Homework, camping pictures and the latest Spice Girls album were al neatly filed and available 24×7. I got tired of backing up the server manually and installed a 2nd drive and “mirrored” all the data. Now if a drive failed I had another one with all the data on it!
This week after about 6 years of service, TemHold’s motherboard died. Great. I had 2 copies of all the data and no way to get to them. The drives were a special format so I couldn’t just pop them a PC. Fortunately I found a peice of software that would read the funky format. OK, not having a media server isn’t an option, we need another TempHold. After the usual Google-Kung-Fu, I found our replacement, it was from Synology. Now is a good time to upgrade the storage. Originally the storage was 300GB, then I upgraded it to 500GB, then I added a 2nd 500GB drive. Yesterday I bought (2) 2 Terabyte drives. They cost less than my original 300 GB drive.
I hope to have all the data transferred within the next 24 hours. It appears we will keep our data intact (knock on wood) we have never lost our digital shoebox. Wish me luck. Long Live TempHold!
Believe it or not, the long suffering IT Department in the Christy household is greatly appreciated. He gets an A+ for customer service. Where else can you go and say “It doesn’t work!” and have them understand that you are saying you cannot connect to the internet and show you, literally, 15 separate times how to unplug the router and plug it back in. “Which one is the router again, the one silver one or the black one??” We love you IT, we would be lost without you!
Thanks for the kind words from our CFO. Fortunatly the IT budget has not been a point of contention so the IT staff are in good spirits. The migration was successfull and no data was lost.