The other day I was reminded about best practice but not at work – at home, when my NAS drive failed.
We’re all used to mission critical environments and taking care of data with a proper backup and restore plan in the corporate environment, but how many of us follow this up at home?
Our memories, that used to be on silver bromide paper, are now digitally stored on a multitude of devices. Most of these devices don’t have any redundancy and will, at some point, fail.
So we’re putting all our data eggs literally in one HDD basket.
With this in mind a well specified central NAS solution on a home network is a great start. What do I mean by “well specified”? Two drives in a mirrored or suitably redundant configuration. When buying the two drives, order them from different brands or suppliers to reduce the chances of simultaneous failure and remember to buy NAS or Enterprise grade drives which sometimes come with a better five year warranty. Then ideally add a third hot or cold swap drive.
Finally we need to get some off site protection. This can be one of the many cloud services available or could be another external HDD to which you backup the NAS to regularly and take offsite, or both. The choice is down to data volume and preference.
It’s important to remember to Keep It Simple
As an end to this story – I removed the offending failed mirror drive, inserted a new one and four hours later we were redundant again. Then my desktop drive failed, but that’s another story …