[Peter Johnson]

294's lab server is a dual Athlon 64 with 2 GB of RAM, running FreeBSD. It has 2x1 TB SATA drives mirrored for bulk storage, and 2x36 GB SCSI drives (also mirrored) for boot and faster storage of CAD files during build season. The server is showing its age (it feels a little sluggish at times) but was donated (by me) so was free for the team.

It's pretty much just used as a Samba server; we have 3 shared drives that are mapped on our windows machines:
Z: -> "294 Technical": Primary technical work area. Various top level folders including "FRC" and "Vex", next level is season (e.g. "2012 Rebound Rumble"), and then beneath that we have Analysis/CAD/Code/etc.
Y: -> "294 Business": business, marketing, outreach, etc. Photo and video archive is here, like the technical drive it's organized by competition/season. Also has things like pamphlets, signup forms, student handbook, etc.
X: -> "FLL": Shared drive for our FLL teams. Less organization here, but it's separately mapped from the Z: drive to give them freer reign of the space.

We have our own network independent of the school's network (we had issues with the school network going down on weekends, and people printing to our lab printer). We use a standard home internet router/firewall to bridge from our LAN to the school network solely for the purpose of internet access. Now when the school network goes down, we only lose internet, not access to our shared drives.

For backup, the team server is rsync'ed nightly to my home server (it ssh's out through the school connection). My home server is much more of a beast (quad core Q6600 with 8 GB RAM and ~10TB of drive space on ZFS, also running FreeBSD), so that's also where I save nightly and weekly snapshots in case we ever need to perform data recovery. Someday I'll upgrade at home and the team will get a nice upgrade.

Our team website is completely independent from this on a managed host in a standard datacenter.

The main downside with this approach that we've not been able to overcome yet is external access from the web. We've worked around it in a few ways (scouting and roster applications hosted on a dedicated server I own, and by using stunnel), but in general the team server is only accessible in the lab.