Help with home network setup and backup solution

[Maffew]

Hi all,

I've just bought my first house (wooooo!) and it's a fixer upper (boooo!) We're getting it fully rewired and would like to take the opportunity to run some ethernet.
My fiance and I work from home and run a software development company.
We use the network a lot for sharing files between our machines but currently only backup to external hard drives.
We're getting quite a bit of work and it's becoming more and more apparent that we need to keep additional backups so would like to factor this into the network setup.
Although I'm quite tech savvy, I'm quite ashamed to say I've never used NAS drives or a Server and don't have much of a grasp on networking.
I would like to keep the networking hardware in the utility room at the back of the house.
The broadband currently enters at the front of the house.

Question 1: would it be better to run coaxial to the utility room or just have an additional network port in the living room?

Question 2: I have 2 machines that I use as a render farm, connected to the network and just use remote desktop if I need to make any changes. What size server cabinet would you recommend for 2 PCs and the additional networking hardware?

Question 3: With 2 rack mounted PCS would I need additional cooling?

Question 4: I intend to run 2 cat6 cables from the office to use for hdmi over ethernet. Would it be possible to have 2 ports in the front living room, 2 ports in the back room and choose which to route the hdmi to or would I have to physically swap cables each time I wanted to change it?

Question 5: I was looking at a NAS drive for backups. If I bought a microserver instead would this do as good and as reliable a job? Can I easily backup in a RAID?

Question 6: I would also like an offsite backup. Would this just be something as simple as a synology diskstation or similar at another location that I can use as a personal cloud?

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to read this, any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

 

[Maffew]

Wow! Thanks for the incredible reply!

The PC's aren't in rack cases at the moment but I intend to put them in some just to keep it tidy and all in one place.

Ive never heard of crashplan, that seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. Do you use it yourself? Would it be enough to just run a raspberry pi with drives connected at another site?

 

[Maffew]

Your render boxes could probably be converted to 1U items.

They both have fairly cumbersome CPU coolers and graphics cards. I was imagining having to use a 4U case. Is this just a matter of being efficient with space?

You could also look at HDBaseT. It's more expensive, but runs over an existing network.

I've read a little about HDBaseT but thought this was just a standard? Does it run over Cat6 then I'd use a different adapter over the Ethernet to HDMI?

Edit: Just had a read and it looks like you can carry UHD over a single cable