What I've done is put a second storage drive in each of my computers and have an external drive as well. Then I sync my music, photo, and work folders using a program called GoodSync, which is free and works well. Have synced over 9000 files, music, photos, and work stuff with GoodSync with not problems. Couple of reasons I do it this way. I download my photos to one computer and use a second computer for ripping music. Second, I have the files on the computer I'm using so I don't have to worry about any network bottlenecks. The external drive I just use for backup only. To start, you really wouldn't need an external drive because you could have copies of everything on the 2 computers. Hard drives are pretty inexpensive, an 80GB is about $50 and a Seagate 320GB is about $120. Idea to think about