Storage of data has become a matter of (digital) life or death, and backing up your data before something goes wrong is more relevant now than ever before. You see, it's not just about making sure you have a copy of your CV or a couple pictures your friend sent you. With the advent of digital photography and its adoption by the masses, the chances are that all your new pics are in digital format, nicely stored on your hard drive, not to mention a few home movies made with your digital camcorder, where your kid utters their first words or shows their first missing teeth!
And you know your wife/husband will never forgive you if you lose those!!
Beyond documents and pictures, you probably have a nice collection of music and movies in digital format, and no backup copies on DVD/CD (which is the whole point of having them on your hard drive, after all, and not on a pile of DVDs), and these too are precious.
You can consider backing up to online storage, which is great, but if you have a few gigabytes and each movie adds a few more, this is not exactly the quickest way of backing up or restoring your data. An external hard drive is a good option, but if something goes wrong with that HDD, you are back to square one.
And this is where a NAS, or Network Attached Storage device comes in handy. If you get the right device, you will not only have a place to store a backup of your data but you will also have it safely stored and available at the same time to all computers (and even your Playstation 3) at the same time.
A good and inexpensive solution for the home user is the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo, to which you can add 2 hard disk drives and have it write everything you want in both disks at the same time (RAID1 or mirror), so in case one fails, your data will still be safe on the other hard disk, and the moment you replace the failed hard disk your data is immediately replicated to this new one. And all this without having to stop the device or interrupting a backup.
To add to the peace of mind this brings, this little NAS still streams music, pictures or movies to your UPNP devices and computers, so you can watch a movie on your TV via your game console or listen to your music collection anywhere in the house. It even has an iTunes server. And with a little application you can install on the NAS, your data will be available to you anywhere you have Internet access!! A couple 1TB HDD will do wonders in storage space, and you can upgrade the storage with 2 TB HDDs when the prices come down!
The other solution is do what I did a couple years ago, turning an old PC into a NAS by adding a SATA controller card (bought on eBay, from China, for little more than £2) and a 500GB hard drive. Install Ubuntu Linux and a few small apps and you have a homemade NAS for the price of the hard drive and the controller. After you set it up, you won't need a keyboard, mouse or monitor for this one. Of course, it will probably be big and noisy and consume a lot more power than a small device like a dedicated NAS, but there is a price to pay for compromises. I was really glad when I finally got my ReadyNAS setup!
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