I’m new to WD products, and NAS in general, and looking for a little advice. Here’s some background - I have a home network, which 4 people use. Currently, there are 2 vista laptops, and 2 win7 laptops in the house with no network storage. The network was designed several years ago for casual use. However, now 3 members of the family are telecommuting, so we are upgrading.
We have ordered 3 new laptops with win8 for work, and intend to use the old ones occasionally, so there will be 7 computers total. I am installing a Linksys smart wifi router, and I have ordered a WD mybook live personal cloud 3tb for network storage. I want to configure it so that all computers will backup to the WD automatically in addition to using it for shared media etc.
Here are my questions:
- Is there a limit to how many user accounts I can create on the WD?
- Is there a limit to how many computers I can install the auto backup software on?
- Would it be better to create one account for each person (meaning 2 computers would be backed up in a single account) or should I create an account for each computer I want to backup?
- I haven’t received the WD yet, but I read the instruction manual online and it sounds like passwords are optional when creating user accounts. Would adding a password interfere with auto-backup (i.e. computer not having access automatically)?
- In addition to file backup, I want users to be able to files like mp3s or recipes, and have easy access via mobile device if their laptops are shut down. Should these shared files be stored in the same user account as computer backups, or should I make separate accounts?
Thanks in advance for any help, opinions, or advice anyone has. I’m new at this, and I want to get auto-backup set up on the new laptops right away, but I don’t want to mess them up configuring something that won’t work.