In 2004, I was working on my second film, The Virtual Kevin Project. The film was a documentary that required a huge amount of hard drive space to store all the data and clips that had been imported, along with all the FCP editing information. I had laid off an uncompressed version of the film onto a second drive, but had kept all of my main files on a single drive. Unfortunately, it was in a DIY hard drive enclosure that didn't have proper ventilation so it ended up crashing and burning before I had made a final DVD. To make matters worse, when I went to recover the uncompressed version of the film from the professional external drive I'd laid it off on, I found that it too had crashed. After that awful experience, I've been extremely careful to make numerous backups of all my film footage, edits, and the like. However, as we all know, this constant series of manual backups is a bit of a pain.
The good folks at Hewlett-Packard have harnessed the power of Microsoft's new Home Server software to make this problem much easier to deal with. While this is a huge benefit for filmmakers who do all their editing from a single computer, it's an absolute Godsend for those working on files from multiple computers in a small network.
With that said, let's take a look at the MediaSmart Server EX495, which has a 2.5 Ghz Dual-Core Intel Processor, 2 Gigs of RAM, and 1.5 TB of storage. (Note: Although there's a lot of storage on this machine, this is not an external hard drive, but a home server system that backs up files and creates a central location for certain commonly accessed media files.)
The media server comes in a small case that is very sleek and well ventilated. When you look on the back of the computer-based machine, it's a little confusing. It looks like a raided hard drive, but it isn't equipped to connect to a computer via USB or firewire. Instead, it connects either to a single computer or your network hub by a Gigabit Ethernet Cable. It won't be auto-detected like a traditional accessory, but will require you to install the HP variant of the Windows 2003 Home Server package. This will essentially create a unique web interface that allows you to login and interact with your server. (You will then install this on each computer that needs access.) While the web-style interface is a bit clunky (I really wish they had a more traditional program interface you could choose to use instead!), it works pretty well. Once you answer all the setup questions you need to, the system is ready to let you set up areas for access within your network and to setup server wide backups. You can access past backups through this interface and even tell it to protect or schedule to delete certain backups.
