Thinking about buying a home network storage device to store and protect your valuable photos, videos and music? Think again, people are still losing data once they buy one of these. Find out why they are and how you can not lose your data.
Home Network Storage is more than a fad,
it is the way our electronic lives are moving; and at a faster pace every day. Think of all of those 2 megapixel photos you have, soon to be replaced by 8 and 12 megapixel photos!
Not to mention the high definition video. You used to store a home movie video tape in the closet and that was that. Now you download it from your HD camera to your computer in raw format. Then you edit it and create another copy of it. Followed by "producing" it to DVD format and saving a copy of that.
What comes next?
You buy a home network storage device from Netgear, Iomega or DLink -
and you end up losing your data anyway.
Why would you lose data, I thought that is what your network attached storage device was all about, protecting your irreplaceable photos, videos, iTunes and all your other data?
The problem is that many people do not know how to buy network storage, then make the mistake of thinking it is infallible.
Here are three ways others lose data anyway - AND how NOT to lose your data!
First, home network storage devices do not all come equipped with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) protection. RAID, properly configured, will protect your data from a single hard drive failure because there are redundant disks in the network attached storage (NAS) device.
So if your NAS device does not have multiple disks configured in a proper RAID array, you will lose data when the hard drive fails, same as in a PC.
The first solution so you do NOT lose data is to make sure your home network storage device has multiple disks. You have to buy the right unit with the proper configuration.
After that, make sure the multiple disks are NOT configured as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) or RAID0 (RAID Zero). With either of those two configurations, your data is NOT protected by multiple hard drives.
Some vendors advertise the capacity of their product using RAID0 because it is a larger number - do not be fooled! RAID0 is almost never what you want.
Second, you need to know if one of your redundant drives fail so that you can get it replaced BEFORE another drive fails. Some NAS devices will have indicator lights on the front to indicate individual drive status and have a way to indicate a failed drive.
An improvement over the LED's on the front is to configure the storage device to email you when it detects a problem. This is easy to setup and I highly recommend it.
Third, you can still lose data even though none of your drives fail. One way for that to happen is if you accidentally delete it yourself. It happens.
The solution for that is to backup your data! Some home network storage devices allow you to backup to an attached USB drive with the touch of a button. That USB drive can then be stored at mom's house, a safe deposit box, in your locker at work or wherever.
Another way is to backup your NAS to an online backup service. Some vendors have that capability built in to their product. Just subscribe to their service, run through the quick configuration and you are set.
Every week I have people contact me for help getting back data they lost due to hard drive failures and no backups. Do NOT be one of them!
Find out which
home network storage device is right for you AND learn how to configure it so that it actually PROTECTS your data like you expect it to.
The reviews, how-to videos and NAS tips at our website will give you the information you need to make the right decision and the knowledge to help you avoid losing data. Come over to
http://NetworkStorageTips.com right now for the answers.
