Tiger/XP network storage solution

[zelmo]

I'm looking for a relatively low-cost solution for backing up my iMac G4, PowerBook and my wife's VAIO laptop. Ideally, I'd want to do a direct connect to each laptop for backing up the drives, then also be able to access the drive via wireless from either laptop to copy files (GarageBand, iMovie and the like) back and forth.
I don't know much about networking or drive formatting. If I just get a 320GB external drive with FW400/800/USB 2.0 connectors and hang it off the iMac, will I be able to access the drive from both OSes by enabling filesharing on the iMac? Is it really that simple?
Remote access from the XP lappy is not really crucial, as long as the drive is formatted as to permit me to hook it up for backups.

[the fly]help me[/the fly]

 

[MacVault]

Yep, direct connect a drive to your iMac and share it and it will be available to your other Macs or PCs on the network. This is way better than backing up to a drive attached to a PC - which would make you have to go over SMB which is slow and combined with windows-formatted drives loses resource forks/metadata from your files.

 

[zflauaus]

If you don't want to have your computers sharing all the time, you could go the route of Network Attached Storage or NAS. These hard drives are in a case but have an ethernet port on the back to connect to your network. Buffalo, Maxtor, and Linksys make some good ones from what I've read in articles. Just make sure you find one that doesn't need proprietary software. Just look around their sites. Just an alternative.

 

[slooksterPSV]

I'm looking for a relatively low-cost solution for backing up my iMac G4, PowerBook and my wife's VAIO laptop. Ideally, I'd want to do a direct connect to each laptop for backing up the drives, then also be able to access the drive via wireless from either laptop to copy files (GarageBand, iMovie and the like) back and forth.
I don't know much about networking or drive formatting. If I just get a 320GB external drive with FW400/800/USB 2.0 connectors and hang it off the iMac, will I be able to access the drive from both OSes by enabling filesharing on the iMac? Is it really that simple?
Remote access from the XP lappy is not really crucial, as long as the drive is formatted as to permit me to hook it up for backups.

[the fly]help me[/the fly]

The cool thing about sharing like that is you can have the drive formated as whatever you want. HFS+, FAT32, (Still no one has tried NTFS on Mac like to have an external formated as NTFS, strange) NFS, EXT, RESIER.