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I know people here prefer the Egg (and so do I), but I need to recommend a home network storage solution that can be purchased at Best Buy.

This will be used mostly for photos and some videos (probably around 1TB of data), and to backup 2 different laptops. If it comes with software to make the backup easy as pressing a button (or running a program) even better. I'm trying to keep the budget under $250, but can stretch it if needed.

Here's a link to the products Best Buy lists on their site:

Best Buy Network Drives

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

most good home routers come with a USB port for shared storage or printing over the network you can plug an external hard drive into the router and set the laptop's backup to the shared hard drive.

You are at least two years late to the backup party, but I would have highly recommended a WHS for this job. I have an upgraded HP MediaSmart Server I bought years ago (added faster CPU and 2gb RAM) and it is an ideal setup to back up my 5 networked PCs. It is so much more than a simple backup solution that I can't even begin to praise its abilities. Suffice to say I recommend it enough to have bought two of them in the past month for friends looking for a good backup solution/media storage setup.

Since you've mentioned Worst Buy, if you happen to have an older desktop PC that has a large enough storage pool (say 500gb or so) you can purchase this from Best Buy and install it as a homebrew WHS PC:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Windows+Home+Server+2011+64-Bit+-+System+Builder+%28OEM%29+-+Windows/4734195.p?id=1218518548672&skuId=4734195

Here's the lowdown on a WHS capabilities -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server

I'll throw in my two cents for Windows Home Server as well. I cobbled together a system based on a $25-ish Sempron chip and 2 gig of RAM and then a few big hard drives. I don't know about the newer 2011 version, but I am using the older version and the backup and file sharing capabilities work really well for what I use it for. I've used the backup to restore a whole drive image and also to pull just a few individual files and it has been pretty fast and pretty easy to use.

The Seagate GoFlex drive listed there is not too shabby. I set one up for a customer a year ago or so, and it comes with Memeo backup software, which by default backs up your documents, videos, pics, etc. as long as they are in the default location. You can add locations to it as well.

It has some basic user rights features - each user has a private folder, and shares a public folder. There's also some kind of web-enabled remote access, similar to tappin.com available through seagate. I didn't really use that so I don't know how well it works.

The 2011 WHS does not support the drive extender technology that made WHS v1 so accommodating. Just toss another drive into the pool and it would be added to the total drive space. JBOD at its finest. A clear division arose in the WHS community between old version users who demanded drive extender support and guys who just wanted the newer OS and not too concerned with drive extender. Funny thing is, Windows 8 now has drive extender technology built right into it !!!

Stupid MS ... I mean, I want to buy your stuff, but sometimes you vex me so and try my patience.

So in conclusion, if you only have one HD in your desktop to be re-purposed as a WHS, it doesn't affect you to buy the 2011 version and use that.

I'll look into setting up a WHS.. the main reason I was looking at Best Buy was that it was an "emergency" need.. I would have had to give my mother the exact specs of what to buy, then talk her through the setup process and start everything remotely

Fortunately it turned out not to be needed, and I can take my time setting her up with a proper solution. Ideally, I'd love for it to be plug and play, so tech support is easy for me to do when I'm not visiting my parents

Buying everything new at BestBuy with 2TB of storage may break the $250 budget, no matter vanilla NAS or WHS?

Oh, I'm not looking at BB any more.. I'll be going with Newegg