>>This is also my latest advice to everybody who is planning or rearranging a LAN. Buy a NAS Server. Mine is QNAP TS-209 Pro. It is cheap enough, relatively simple to set up, always online and has many useful features.
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>>My biggest current problem is that I now kind of feel forced to act and think like the network administrators who I have often criticized for forbidding people things. As an example, I now force the LAN users to use their personal network drive letter for their original documents. And each time that a computer/laptop looses (wireless) connection they come to me and complain.
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>>>I would say that is a good approach. I tried doing this for a while but found it was a pain to coordinate keeping that one computer on, so I went out and bought a Network Attached Storage device. Works great.
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>A NAS server is not applicable to everybody that has a LAN. Some people might just be sharing music or photos between two machines and don't care about any of the advantages of an always-on drive.

Think of this construction: A person lives ALONE and has a lightweight laptop. Leightweight means here that it has only a 20 Gb Solid State Drive (SSD). The majority of his documents is on a NAS Server at home. When at home he makes a wireless connection to the network drive letter and makes a backup of the documents he has worked on offline and he gets copies of documents he plans to work on offline today. But it may also be the case that at work, which is far away, he appears to need a document that is not on his laptop. He logs in to the NAS Server, using the internet or an ftp-client, and downloads it.

I think a NAS Server is applicable to everybody, even to those who live alone.