Thanks for the tips Neil! I actually already bought a Synology NAS drive with two bays, but just one disk to start off with. Maybe I will get the 2nd disk for a backup drive.
Aaron, right now it's just me and I have one main computer where all my DataCAD drawing files are, and also an external hard drive that I have affectionately named FlatFile on which resides closed jobs dating back to whenever I first started using DataCAD. Additionally I have a laptop at my cute little downtown space I leased last fall. (In the interest of full disclosure...I am not a young person, I have never worked at a large firm and I have always done my own IT through a process known as "winging it")
What I would like to do is have all of my drawing files accessible on one drive, including everything on FlatFile and work directly from that drive from wherever I am and whatever computer I happen to be using that day. And if I worked a couple hours on a drawing from one location, hopped over to the 2nd location for a meeting and happened to make a couple quick revisions to a drawing using the computer I have there..everything would be in one place as if I was working from one hard drive that can somehow magically be anywhere I want it to be without me having to actually lug around an external drive and probably lose it somewhere. (Voilà! Network Attached Storage! Mind boggling.)
In the end I think what I did was OK, I got the synology drive, and installed it per their instructions and got it set up like a little server. I'm able to access it just fine from my remote location and experimented today with opening drawing files and modifying them right from the server folder and it worked great. Apparently I can even access the files from my phone with an app, but that was more than I could handle today. Baby steps.
My question is, what DataCAD folders should I install on the NAS, other than the drawing folder? But I think I figured out I should put my default drawing folder, XREF and Bitmap folders on the NAS. Is that right? Anything else? Is that the dumbest question ever? I've been working with two independent setups for so long it's hard for me to wrap my ancient brain around network storage. Yes, I am archaic. In my defense, the last time I looked into network storage it was out of my price range. That might have been 15 years ago but whatever.
Lori