Center for REALTOR® Technology Web Log

We all get lazy. Right? [Well maybe not Keith]. Storing files locally on our desktop or laptop. Only maintaining one copy of them. Hoping that nothing happens to the drive, or the machine gets stolen. Right? Are you with me so far?

Well, for a while I was maintaining a little linux R2-UNIT (my nickname) for Windows Samba shares. It would do its thing at night, archive itself so i can roll back X amount of days, etc. It was working dandy, but the machine was a beast. Pentium II, power hog, desk hog, and I just got annoyed maintaining it. I get to tinker at work all day, sometimes at home, I just want to forget about all that fun stuff.

So, needless to say, I got lazy, and started to store it all locally and not really even think of occasionally transferring it to the other machine. That would mean, I would have to turn it on, which became a chore in itself.

This coincided well with when I got my digital camera. Therefore, my photos were all on my desktop.

Anyway, to make a long story short, my desktop started to act very wonko. After a few reboots, it went dead. I quickly pulled the Hard Drive out, and tried to recover using an external drive bay. Boy did windows not like connecting to that drive. I really thought I lost it all. At this point, I did two things.

• Firgured out a better file retention strategy
• Used a linux recovery disk to try to salvage my files

Both were fun projects, one entailed spending cash for a new toy, the other got me to tinker with some tools and utilities. I will leave the tinkering and recovering (which I did manage to recover 100% of the photos) to a later post. This post is more geared toward a simple home storage solution.

First, the main lesson from this; Do not store your files locally or with only a single point of loss.

My goal was to come up with something that just works. Has ample amount of storage, doesn’t have a big footprint, and will allow multiple machines to attach to it.

I did some research, talked to some people, and I finally landed on the Western Digital Dual Drive 1TB Network Area Storage. It was a great price point for the amount of data.

Out of the box, it comes as a full terra-byte shared configuration. Following the docs, I easily converted it to a mirrored 500GB storage unit. With Mirroring, I therefore get real time file synchronization across the two drives. This doesnt help if the place burns down, or both drives fail, etc. But I will worry about that at a later point.

It sits directly on the network through its gigabit ethernet card, takes a small footprint and just works. Once set up, I began copying files over. I also pointed my Windows ‘My Documents’ to drop right into folder on the unit.

I now have a very easy to maitain network storage device. And I am trying to be better with saving locally out of laziness.

Pros
Price point, easy configuration, ample storage, small foot print, network accessible, directory privilege configuration, dual drive mirror capability, and peace of mind (priceless).

Cons
Transfer rate during the large file swap was slow (probably due to the smaller processor in the unit). When accessing it from more than one machine, performance was decreased to a noticeably slower level, but it wasn’t a painful speed reduction. Its additional USB device connector can only be accessed with the supplied software which seems clunky (and not needed outside of this and remote access features)

Final Note
These units do also come with software that will allow you to access your files remotely (they claim regardless of your firewall and internet connection). I am not using it, I sometimes dont trust black magic wizardry such as that.