Sharing data across several Macs

We've been using laptops exclusively at home for a few years now, which works reasonably well. But now we've reached a point where it gets too troublesome to keep all the data on the laptops: It's just too much stuff to fit on typical laptop hard drives, and it's hard to sync the different machines.

How are other people solving this problem? What's a good way to store data (mostly photos managed in iPhoto, and music managed in iTunes) centrally and share between different laptops? And of course there should be a backup for the data as well. Here's the options I can think of:

• Buy some NAS solution (any recommendations?). But how can I solve the backup issue?
• Set up a simple server using a Mac mini with an external drive. Backup could be done via time machine.
• Buy a time capsule for data, and another one for backing up the time capsule. Is that even possible?

Any input, any better ideas? I really think Apple needs to offer a iHomeServer kind of solution. The cloud is not an answer for everything...

 

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A RAID is not a backup... with the power network being as bad as it ishere in China, it could easily fry all the harddrives at once. Is there some RAID systems that can backup themselves to another system?