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.

Everything can fail

The most basic principle in making a good backup strategy is: Everything can fail.

Harddrives break down, DVDs are suddenly unreadable and the fancy "in the cloud" online backup company goes out of buisness.

Think this way: At any time there is a probabillity that a given data storage will fail you. When that happens it will take some time before you realise it, it will take some time to get a replacement storage and it will take some time to make a new backup.

Simple backup for everybody

Here is a way of doing backup which will work well for most people:

Buy a USB flash drive and copy your data to that about once every month.

For some documents and pictures a 4 or 8 GB drive should do it. If you also want to backup some movies you should go for a USB harddrive.

Price

Very cheap.

Ease of use

Easy but requires some manual work. You don't have to set up any accounts, automatic schedules or technical stuff. Instead you have to do the work yourself and some people don't want to bother doing that.

You might want to use an online solution - wait for another posting about that.

Safety

Better than nothing. This solution will protect you against a crashed harddrive and damaged or deleted files. If you store the drive in another house (e.g. at a friends place) you will also be protected against theft, fire and other kinds of local natural disasters. Big scale disasters such as earth quake or massive fires requires that the drive is much further away. Consider an online solution or a "NAS friendship" - see upcomming posts for that.