No Fuss Backup?

[iSeven]

Say I have a network in the house of 5 PCs. One just suffered a HDD failure. I'm concerned more might go.

Here is what I want to accomplish, in backing up the PCs with important data;

-User accounts for the data so important folders do not have access by non users.
-Reliability
-IP-based
-FTP accessible from web?
-Quick and easy drag and drop once a user has logged in for the day, or that PC account has logged in. Status notifications.

OK, now I know I could purchase the dedicated NAS type for storage that basically does all that, but from what Ive seen they are very expensive.

Would it be possible to use one of the idle Windows 7 PCs as the host server, without installing a server OS? The SQL term confuses me, not sure it has to do with these types of servers but that was a name that popped into mind.

To stay cheap, would I just place two new drives in the office tower, and have RAID handle the redundancy, and software handle the storage backup traffic?

Thanks for pointers. This is for partial business backup, so everyone's documents and graphic work are important to save.

This is the part of windows 7 I could never get along with. I had a drive mapped once to all PCs and they ended up working for a week, then, the drive turned to a disconnected red "X", although it still worked, PCs stopped connecting to it.

[maxgull]

Windows Home Server, I would suggest the old version, it is easier to add HDDs to. It can be set up to auto backup any/all machines, you can set priveliges for shared folders, set static ip, and have web access (I havent got web access to mine, never really needed it).
And it is cheap.

[Scubar]

would have to agree, I use the old WHS still and it works flawlessly.

The new WHS they have really made a mess off as they have aimed it more towards medium sized businesses instead of HOME users.

[Orac]

yeh another in agreement here, i got whs 2011, but i dont have enough space to do full backups i have more stuff on orac than the total space on my server