I recently put out the cash to purchase one of these new NAS (Network Attached Storage) systems for use at home. These are somewhat different than the usual USB-attached hard drives we are all familiar with. I’ve use an external USB-attached drive as a backup target for many, many years. I’ve had 2,4,8 GB versions and so on and they’ve all done OK over the years for the most part. The last one, though started to wear prematurely. And, the amount of data that I need to I store has steadily increased over the years, and storing data in multiple locations on multiple hard drive is becoming unwieldy. I no longer use the external drive for a backup target only – I also use it for archiving photo and media projects for long-term storage.
I chose the Buffalo Tera Station NAS for a couple of good reasons. It’s a RAID storage device – this means that if a drive begins to fail, you can pop in a standby drive and recover all of your data before it become irretrievably lost. Secondly, Buffalo NAS device are very secure – they’re aren’t loaded with add-on features and services that turn out to be security attack points for hackers.
A NAS drive sits on your local home Wi-Fi/Ethernet network, so it’s available for all your computers and devices. I have three computers and each of them use a network share on the NAS to store their backup files. The NAS device is essentially a small Network server, so you can create multiple file shares for different purposes and users.