Hey Guys,
Got my hands on a new machine(well new to me). It has a pretty good processor, 32g ram, 2gb video card…etc…It’s going to be a gaming machine for my kiddos. But I have other plans also.
I was thinking of throwing a second drive on for my backups of my laptop. I would just make the drive it’s own partition and not give the kids users access to it.
My question is… Do you think there would be issues with me using the machine as a file-server/gaming machine simultaneously.
To be honest the file server aspect would be used rarely… and my kids are only allowed to game on weekends. So I think it may work… Then again, it could be a part time plex server also…lol
Any ideas on how you would manage this, or if you think it is a bad idea would be greatly appreciated.
Kids playing with the computer containing your backups? That sounds scary but if your kids have a separated, non-admin account with no access to the drive, that should be ok I think (as long as they cannot physically assault your PC like checking how long it takes for it to get down the stairs).
That being said, I do not have experience with the situation you describe: my one year old has not requested her PC yet, and for backups I have a different organization that does not require another PC (Crashplan with 2 encrypted backup sets: one in the cloud on their server, and one local on my NAS with 2 x 2 Tb disks, mirrored in RAID 1).
If they are young kids no!. If they are older and can be sensible on a PC, then yes but as aforementioned by Spleenico, only as a guest or other user account with no admin privileges!. 
Well the boy’s are nine…but it is not my only backup…it would be secondary, mainly since I just happen to have the resources now…
I actually just installed Ubuntu MATE on the machine, put a 2tb HD in it. I have 750g for the boys. The rest I made a separate partition and locked the boys out of it. They strictly have standard Desktop User rights with no sudo privileges.
Now I guess I just have to set my new partition as a smb share and map it to my laptop. Then I will just set up a cron job to run a backup from my laptop to it in the evenings.
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