Get those pictures off that camera!

Do you keep your pictures on your camera, and never copies them to the computer? History has countless examples of loosing the first years of their child, the pictures from their honey moon or other important pictures. The camera may get lost, stolen or damaged along with all of the pictures.

If nothing else, make it a habit of copying them to the computer every month or so.

Backup: Help your mom

When visiting your moms house, she may not have backup and may not be able to make one. Help her out: Just make a copy of her pictures, documents and e-mails onto a USB stick and keep the data under your backup solution. It may not be updated that often, but when her computer fails, it is better than nothing.

NAS friendship

If you have a friend that has a NAS box of the same brand as yourself, you can often set your boxes to synchronize with each other over the internet. This is a very cheap way of getting an offsite backup.

Just note:

• You must trust your friend, as he may see all of your data.
• You should not set your boxes to synchronize everything, if you have movie or music collections. It will use all of your band with and may break copyright laws.

What is a NAS?

NAS is short for Network Attached Storage. Usually it is a box running RAID1 or RAID5, which can be connected to your network and looks like a shared network drive. Then you can access it from any of your computers.

Very often the NAS has a lot of extra features built in, such as photo sharing, bittorrent download, iTunes support and more. If you have multiple NAS boxes of the same brand, your can often set them up to synchronize with each other. This can be used to creates a cheap and automatic offsite backup.

A NAS is a very easy way of running RAID and at the same time get easy access to your data.