Here's what I'm planning... I currently use my Mac Mini as an iTunes media server, with the library hosted on Synology NAS. The network and disk access speeds are fine for this purpose, but the fact is, left idle long enough, the connection seems to drop from iTunes, leading to errors accessing content from my Apple TVs.
So, I'm planning on just getting an external USB3 HD for the media library to hook up directly to the Mini, and re-configuring the NAS to use all of that old media storage space for its Time Machine backups.
However... at this point I'm wondering whether or not to move the other networked folders off the NAS and onto the Mini, and devote the NAS to almost entirely be Time Machine, with a (comparatively) small amount of space reserved for any Synology services I might want to play around with/configure in the future.
So, if I want to basically create network drives for individuals and groups in the house (e.g., a network share each for myself and my wife personally, one shared that's only accessible to both of us, and one "public" to anyone on the network) that would be accessible from Macs, iOS devices, and Windows, do I need macOS Server, or would basic macOS be up to that job?
Would there be any other macOS Server features that might be useful enough in a "household" setting to warrant going that way? I'm kind of interested in device manager to manage the kids' hand-me-down iOS devices - anyone ever use that for this kind of operation? I like the convenience of the cached downloads for macOS/iOS updates and Photostream, too, but that's an add-on benefit, not a deal-maker on its own.
So, I'm planning on just getting an external USB3 HD for the media library to hook up directly to the Mini, and re-configuring the NAS to use all of that old media storage space for its Time Machine backups.
However... at this point I'm wondering whether or not to move the other networked folders off the NAS and onto the Mini, and devote the NAS to almost entirely be Time Machine, with a (comparatively) small amount of space reserved for any Synology services I might want to play around with/configure in the future.
So, if I want to basically create network drives for individuals and groups in the house (e.g., a network share each for myself and my wife personally, one shared that's only accessible to both of us, and one "public" to anyone on the network) that would be accessible from Macs, iOS devices, and Windows, do I need macOS Server, or would basic macOS be up to that job?
Would there be any other macOS Server features that might be useful enough in a "household" setting to warrant going that way? I'm kind of interested in device manager to manage the kids' hand-me-down iOS devices - anyone ever use that for this kind of operation? I like the convenience of the cached downloads for macOS/iOS updates and Photostream, too, but that's an add-on benefit, not a deal-maker on its own.