keeping your data safe

with all the data we are generating these days (e.g. all those digital pictures of kids and family), it is too easy to inadvertently lose valuable information. ever lost a dvd before? or had a hard disk go bad on you? it happens more often than you might think! and it's quite a heart attack to think that you might have lost a year's worth of your newborn baby's pictures. not to mention, of course, of the real physical headache you will have when the furious wife bashes you over the head with her teflon-coated saucepan! :-)

the good news is that there are ways to protect your data. my solution was to pick up a network-attached storage (nas) device with 2 slots for hard disks. the nas was loaded with 2 x 500gb hard disks and configured so that the disks will always "mirror" one another. as a network device, this means that all the computers on your wired or wifi network at home will be able to access and share the information. as a "mirrored" setup, that means that if ever one hard disk goes bad, the other one will still have all your data safe and sound. you should, of course, still make a copy of this to dvd if possible. there is no such thing as too many backups of the kids' photos. :-)