Did I make a mistake?

[Wingnut330]

Hello all,

I'm very new to the Mac world and I think I may have made a mistake - not switching to Mac, but more around the Mac that I bought. Here is my situation...

I bought a Mini 2.0 with the intent to connecting it to my new 52" Sony HD LCD. I have done that and it looks stunning! I love the OS and especially iLife. My problem is storage and sharing - and I think that it's more iLife than anything.

I'm in a mixed computing environment - XP desktop, Vista laptop and now the Mini. I would eventually like to be all Mac, but that is down the road.

So I want to share iTunes, pictures, movies etc on my home network. From what I'm gathering, iLife wants everything imported into it and my hard drive is only 120GB. I have more than that in data, so importing it over doesn't make much sense.

What I want to be able to do is store all of my master picture and video files on my NAS drive, work with them on the Mini, view them on the PC's and then mirror them onto another external drive for safe keeping. I was hoping for the Mini to be kind of a HTPC for me. Time Machine and iLife don't seem to want to do that very easily.

Any thoughts? Should I have purchased a more powerful machine? Should I bag the HTPC idea?

 

[tefleming]

The 2GHz mini should be sufficient to do what you're needing.

Where exactly are you having problems?

I don't think Time Machine plays nicely with Network drives, IIRC

Welcome!

 

[Wingnut330]

Thanks for welcoming me aboard!

I fiddled with things this weekend and think that I have the iTunes sharing worked out. Now on to iPhoto...

I want to store my photos on the network, but work with them in iPhoto, same with videos and iMovie. Then I want to be able to make a mirror copy of that NAS for backup.

I think I can point iPhoto the network, but I'm not 100% sure.

When I read about Time Machine I was really excited, but then when I tried using it I realized that it only backs up a Mac, not NAS drives. Big dissappointment.

 

[Pizzer]

Go into ilife prefs. You can specify file location if that's what your searching for.

 

[Wingnut330]

Will iPhoto 'import' them to the Mini or truly work off of the NAS? I thought I read somewhere that it imports them and essentially makes a copy of them on the Mac. Is that true?

 

[MacVault]

This is why Apple & Steve Jobs have vexed my soul.... They refuse to come out with an affordable Mac tower and they force everyone into one of the following:

MacMini = Underpowered & non-expandable
iMac = All-in-one and non-expandable
MacPro = Way too expensive


BOYCOTT APPLE!

 

[themoonisdown09]

This is why Apple & Steve Jobs have vexed my soul.... They refuse to come out with an affordable Mac tower and they force everyone into one of the following:

MacMini = Underpowered & non-expandable
iMac = All-in-one and non-expandable
MacPro = Way too expensive


BOYCOTT APPLE!

Um... no.