Need NAS my friend can acess!

Me and my friend do allot of video work, and our projects ushaully consist of me and him going of to do different parts of the project we happen to be working on inorder to get it done faster. Problem is that we live about 40 miles from eachother and since we cant meet up every day there isint normally ways for him to send the raw videos to me for editing without us meeting up, and him handing off an external hard drive to me, and with the price of gass i really dont wanna spend that much every few days just to do something thats really only for friends and family and ocasionally youtube.


SO, im looking for a NAS Server that my friend can acess ither via browser of via free program from his house. and i want it to not only enable me to recieve the files but to also save the finished projects. I have a computer that i have been using as a pirsonal NAS that runs windows XP home (Its an old Dell Dimension 2400 running at 3.06GHz with Hyper threading, it also has a 1gbps network card, and 2GB of DDR 400MHz ram. and a WIDE array of brand new IDE hard drives) ive been thinking of ordering a basic SATA raid card, and getting 2 3TB WD Red drives, and setting them up in a RAID 1 so i can be shur if one of them dies i wont lose all the data.


NOW HERES THE PROBLEM. I dont know how i can get my friend to acess the system from his house... i looked around and someone said FreeNas was a good option, but i dont know. how would i go about setting it up? any sugestions and tutorieals? or better options? id like it to be free (since ill be spending close to $350 on some new hardware) but i would be willing to spend $20-$30 on the software.


Ive really been looking into the Free.NAS option, so pleas may someone explain if thats possible to me? (remote acess from another network) thanks!

Basicly the answer to your question is your going to need to set up a FTP server. For a NAS Free.NAS is a pretty good software but you also have windows home server, which is about $50 and it will allow you to set up a ftp server and manage data. Im planing on building me one as well. 

With an ftp server what your gonna be doing is opening a port on your router to the internet. if you type the adress for your ftp server into any browser, it will come up with the documents on you server. When you create it, there will be one folder that will house all the documents that you want on the internet, and ANYONE can download them. With windows home server you can set up accounts and passwords. I dont know about free.NAS, never used it. If your planing on allowing files to be uploaded and downloaded, that flags a huge security risk because ANYONE can type that adress into their explorer and upload TONS of gay porn to your server. And who wants that. But with that option you want to choose the one that is most secure. You will have the options of taking it down and puting it up where ever you want. So basicly you can tell you friend to download it, open the port on your router, then when hes done close the port so that no one can access it.

If your dealing with raw video (unedited) i know thats like 30 gb and up. The problem with this is that your friend will be limited to the rate at which he can download it. Basicly his download speed would be that of your home upload speed to the internet. By judging most upload speeds, which is very little, it will take a very long while to do it. That still is the fastest way to do it over the internet. 

Yes, remember the bandwidth limitations.

Lets say you have a 100/10Mbit connection, which means the bottleneck is your up-speed, so if your lucky with your 10Mbit you will be able to upload lets say 1MB a second, even that is a bit of a stretch, but lets say you can do that.

Raw footage, maybe 20GB? How long time will that take for you buddy to download?
20,000MB file / 1MB/s = 5h 30min

Feel free to correct my calculation, but unless both of you have pretty good speeds on your internet its gonna be hard for u guys to collaborate. But at least a very environmental friendly solution.

alredy took that into account, we have a comercle class internet in my house (i share internet with two of my neabors, because our houses are close and its cheeper and faster to get one big account and just split the bill) my internet download speeds max out (with no other netowrk activity) around 20mb/s, upload is about 10mb/s most days :)

whats the newest coppy of windows home server that is 32bit compatible? and dosint my friend need atleast windows 7 buisness to acess from another network?

as the previous comment stated, youll only be able to download a 20gb file in 5 hours, so it might be somthing that you do before you go to bed. 

Also you might try using compressed, rendered video (>5gb) which would take much less time