Alright, from what I can think off, I currently have most of my data on every individual computers and various devices (laptop, phone, etc) at the moment, which is not a wise thing to do because of the event when the hard drive fails due to heavy usage or it's a potential security risk. When I say "most" of the data, I do have a backup server that was intended to be used as a hobby machine which never eventuated. That machine is a Mac Mini G4 currently running OS X 10.5.8 (yeah that's the version limit it can go up to, because of the legacy PowerPC CPU), with about 148GB of usable HDD space. Disadvantage about it is that I cannot access it natively with a Windows machine without any additional software installed. I would've upgraded to Ubuntu but I just don't think the Mac Mini will cope with it.

Previously, I do used to have an external hard drive. 1TB WD MyBook; will never use them again, I'll tell you why but first I do want to tell you what I mainly use it for. My main usage of the external drive is just to store all the extra, but useful data off the PC and onto it, just in case if something does wrong with the PC itself (like partition/format errors, hard drive failure or malware attacks) and of course, to free up the disk space on the PC. But even so, the external drive was almost filled up, leaving just about 40GB out of 931GB of usable space. From then on, I had to find many ways to prevent loss of all of that data. However...

One day, when I again, bumped into the very loosed USB connector of the external HDD, as usual, the HDD lost connectivity to the PC. When I reconnected back in, Windows didn't detect any data on the drive. Sometimes this happens but after another disconnecting and reconnecting the drive it would show up a partition again but this time, it didn't. I thought to myself, oh well, I'll see if OS X (not the Mac Mini!) will detect it. Plugged it up to the other machine, yet again, it didn't see the partition as well. With hope losing, I went to the last effort of trying to recover data by booting to a live Ubuntu distro. And guess what? Nothing!

With almost all hope lost, I was forced to format the drive on Windows in order to recover anything valuable. Tried doing that, only got to recover nothing useful.

So after that experience, I thought to myself, never ever get an OEM external hard drive again but only for cold storage/backup. I decided that it would be better just to get/build a NAS from scratch. I like building computers and I thought making my own NAS would be a good idea. The downside is that it will be quite expensive than getting a NAS. I couldn't think of any type that will be suitable for my application.

When I realised about this giveaway, I thought to myself maybe this machine, with the manageable switch (as mine can't be configured, cheapo switches these days), could fit well into my own storage/backup server proposal. This would also mean that every single devices (including my phone, all of the computers and anything else) will be about to access to the server, after configuring it. About the switch, although my current 8-port, unmanaged one (TP-Link btw) is very handy as my setup expands as it takes off the working load away from the modem/router and it gives me more Ethernet ports, obviously, I do also want a switch than is managed, so that means I can play with the VLAN features and so on.

Although this server is a big step-up; in terms of power consumption and heat it'll produce, it still gives me the advantage to expand the storage capacity when I have to, the freedom to configuring the server and expanding other hardware on it such as memory and adding an expansion card (like a RAID controller). It will also be an advantage of simplifying the topology to a "star" model, as oppose to what I have at the moment; every computers and devices act as a client/server machines/devices, so not really an efficient setup as you can see.

With the current "server", the Mac Mini G4, becoming an aged, legacy machine, I do feel it's the time I should upgrading into a more reliable, configurable server. This would also mean I won't have to deal with cloud-storage due to my preference. :P