After a few aborted attempts to re-utilise the Dell server I came to the conclusion that I don't really need a big, beefy server roaring away in the spare bedroom, sucking up lots of energy and producing even more heat. As a stopgap the Raspberry Pi was just about coping with the workload but is a little bit under-powered for my needs and to add enough storage for all my videos and music requires an external disk anyway.
I thought that a dedicated NAS device would be just the job so bought a WD MyCloud Home device (well they were on offer at Worten!)
After running it for about an hour I quickly came to the conclusion that it was woefully inadequate. Everything was tied down to make it easy for a non-techie to use it but none of the features that I wanted were actually available - except for a file storage. Even that storage was separated for internal network and external access. That device is up for sale now!
After reading some more about available products I bought a Synology Diskstation 218j box and stuffed a 2TB drive in there. Setup was incredibly easy and after a couple of hours experimenting I had decided on a strategy.
Now I can once again watch movies, listen to music and keep all my documents in a central store.
The ability to automatically backup the really important stuff to a remote site is also a bonus.
Finally, I can run my web-sites and even share stuff with anyone in the world simply and securely.