Drop box/networked folder question.

Do you care if they can all see and manipulate each others files? Are they all on Snow Leopard or Leopard?

My recommendation (though I'm only doing it with about 4 macs right now at home so I can't attest to the true scalability) is to back up to a whomping backup drive using Time Machine. If you set it to only backup the desktop folders and document folders, it shouldn't kill the drive space (depending on what you're saving), and it's cleaner than having a single drop box. Best of all, it's brainless- brainless is good.

I've also started using dropbox (the program / service). The great thing is it syncs computers if one person uses multiple computers, but it is also stored in the cloud and could be accessed by people from outside computers (with appropriate username and password), so depending on the level of security you need...

There's probably a better solution, but that's my simpleton advice...

 

Are all computers and the admin computer you want the files backed up to on the same LAN? Or does this need to be done over the internet?

 

In would recommend OS X Server. A Mac Mini Server might even work for you.

 

If everything is on the same LAN, as I was asking about earlier, you can just share a folder and then mount that on everyone's desktop.

 

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1549

There is a guide on setting up a shared folder from your Admin machine. You can set it up so Admin or whatever user you use has Read & Write access and every other users has only write access. Then other users can only drop files into the folder but cannot go in and open or edit files. You'll just want everyone to have a unique name for their file. Probably something like "Vividboarder - MyDocument.doc" so nobody will overwrite another users file.

Once you have the folder shared you just need to mount it on each other computer. Or set the drive to automount. I'll look for links on that last part, but mounting shouldn't be too hard. I think you should see them in finder.