thanks Vince for pointing me in the direction of a NAS.
I have just got one (for £250 with 8 x 3TB NAS HDD - https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/t...astation-24tb-2-x-gen8-microservers.18877629/) and am just setting it up. So far it seems like a nice bit of kit. I have configured as RAID 5 and set up folders and users. I just need to finish doing the web access and then to map the NAS to our home computers - and to totally figure our accessing it over the internet and if its secure.