Reply to comment

I feel your pain. At least, I did when I ran cable through my attic. Insulation is nasty stuff. As you pointed out, wireless is slower and less reliable than a physical connection. 2+ years later, I'm still happy with my decision to physically wire my home.

As far as backup solutions, I use rsync to do one-way copy from client computer to remote server, basically like this:
rsync -vrltpgo --delete --exclude IGNORE_DIR_1 --exclude IGNORE_DIR_2 $SOURCE_DIR $DEST_DIR

It basically ends up capturing a mirror of your machine, so as things are deleted in your local filesystem through regular usage they also disappear from the fileserver, and new stuff is copied over. That may not cut it for some backup needs, but it works pretty well for me. I've got another directory on the remote server where I can drop non-rsync'ed stuff, so that's where I put the things I want to keep on the fileserver only (mpgs I create from DVD collection for simpler viewing on computer, etc.).