old pc for backup

[stealthsniper96]

once my macbook gets here i was wondering how i could use a 5 year old dell to back it up until i have the money to buy a external drive. the HD in the dell is a 40gb so i figured i'd have to use windows and put a 30gb FAT partition on it (macs read/write FAT dont they?). i want to do the backups over my network, if thats at all possible. i think i have almost everything down to get it done but how would i access the partition over the network? will it just show up or wat? thx in advance.

[glc]

To use it over the network, you do not have to use FAT, assuming the Dell has Win2K or XP you can leave it NTFS. All you have to do is read up on how to fileshare between Macs and PC's.

[stealthsniper96]

o ok thx. would it still work if i intsalled linux instead of windows just because it take up less room on the instal?

[kilgoretrout]

Yes, it's commonly done:

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/31/1416242&tid=92&tid=2&tid=6&tid=138

Just set up your old box as a linux file server.