NAS vs. Dedicated Server?

I'm new to the community, as well as new to the whole network storage idea, and I need some help. My mother-in-law is about to start her own in-home based business and needs a secure place to store client information and something to be dedicated to her business. She will not have any employees other than herself, and I highly doubt anything that will be on her hard drive will be accessed from anywhere but home. She has a Windows laptop at the moment, and doesn't have enough storage to partition her hard drive to act as a "server", so that's out of the question. She hopes to upgrade to a MacBook eventually though, so it may be a thought in the future. I was thinking of getting her a NAS based external hard drive (like this:LaCie - LaCie d2 Network 2) so that she can access her client information from in the house and have it secured and separate from her laptop. Is that a good idea? From my understanding, dedicated servers are more for large businesses, but I could be mistaken. I just need clarification on the two and see which one would be better for her. I don't want her to spend an arm and a leg, and I always thought that servers are more on the expensive side. Thanks in advance!

The NAS is your best bet, since all you want is file sharing, after all a NAS is just a hard drive with a bare bones Linux file server

A dedicated server is more use if you want to do more than file sharing, like control users and groups

At this point I wouldn't bother with a NAS at all.

How much data are we talking here?

You might as well put the $$ for the NAS towards a USB hard drive to backup her data versus a NAS.

Unless she'll be working with a lot of images or media etc, how much storage does she actually need.

A NAS will only make it more complex than it needs to be and the data still won't be backed up.

You should really be comparing between a NAS and a external hard drive for storage. The advantages of the NAS is that you get redundancy and protection of your data, while with the single external HD, if it fails, you lose your data unless you've also backed it up elsewhere..

Cost wise, a single external HD is going to be cheaper than the cheapest NAS, but the NAS does give you flexibility of growth and data protection.

I use a ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 1TB drives to hold all of my music, videos and other files. It is also my source code repository and so on..

Depending on your budget, you can find some pretty nice NAS' with the option to hold a couple of drives and when you put in about 1.5TB of space, that should hopefully be enough to hold all the data for the business..