Home Setup Optimization

[OuterMarker]

Looking to the LTT community to help optimize my home setup. I live in a small apartment (500 square feet) with my GF. She uses a MacBook Air and I use a MacBook Pro and a gaming/work station PC. Instead of cable, we have a Mac mini hooked up to our TV with 24 TB of media on it. We have about 5 extra 5 TB hard drives available too. Currently, we have one 5 TB hard drive attached to an AirPort Extreme for wireless backups for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. We have another 5 TB hard drive to backup the PC. The final bits of hardware we have are an old MacBook Pro and an old MacBook Air that we do not use.

The attached picture shows the current setup, but I wanted to know if there was a better way I could set this up. Everything we do and use is digital and the ability to transfer files between computers wirelessly or access them remotely would be great. So far I am able to get most of the Apple products to share with each other, but I cannot get them to work with the PC.

What I would really like to do is to be able to access any document from any computer. For example, we have an Excel finical spreadsheet. I usually update it on the PC, but it would be nice if I could access it from my MacBook Pro too. Right now, I have to save the newest copy on a flash drive and then transfer it to each machine.

I travel for work and am away from home two weeks straight every month. I spend that time in hotels with hotel wifi and bring my MacBook Pro with me. Currently I load up some movies on a 64 GB thumb drive, but would love the ability to access the 24 TB worth of media I have at home. Also, since I am away for so long, sometimes, there is a document on the PC that I forgot to transfer to my MacBook Pro that I would like to have.

The last caveat is I spend half of my time away from home in airplanes, so I don’t always have internet access.

What would you do with this hardware? Would you purchase other things to improve it? I am pretty weak on configuring wifi stuff too but would love to improve the wifi setup we have.

[twisties]

The abundance of Mac hardware makes it difficult for me to think of a whole solution, but go and have a read about https://owncloud.org/

You can think of it as your own personal dropbox with windows/osx/linux desktop clients as well as Android/iOS clients.

 

This could solve the question of accessing things remotely at the very least.

 

Or perhaps setup a VPN connection on your router (if possible) and connect to your home network when abroad to access your shares?

[OuterMarker]

I think a NAS could solve this. Could I use my current hardware to build a NAS, or would I be better off getting new hardware to build a purpose built NAS. I would like to still be able to use my external hard drives if I could.

[twisties]

My knowledge is absolutely zero on building things with Mac hardware.