Last October, a power failure crashed my computer while I was installing a Windows Vista service pack update. The operating system would not boot after that and though I tried to fix the problem with help from a few Globe and Mail IT staff and Microsoft Support I ended up having to wipe my hard drive and reinstall the OS.
I lost a lot of stuff.
I had backed up my documents a few weeks earlier on a second PC in my home, and have, over the years, copied my music and pictures. But I have never backed up my entire video folder because ... I don't know. It's big, it would have taken hours to transfer everything over my home wireless network and so I didn't bother. To my regret.
One of the sub folders in My Videos had home movies, including one from Christmas, 2007, where my eldest daughter, then about 3 ½, sings You are My Sunshine. It was her favourite song. My wife and I would belt it out on car trips when my daughter cried, and it would quiet her. I'd sing it at night before bed and though my daughter knew the words, she applied a little creative substitution. Instead of singing, “You'll never know Dear...” she said: “You'll never know Daddy, how much I love you...”
Without getting too soppy, let me just say it was special and I kick myself to this day for failing to make a copy, post to YouTube, do something that would have saved that precious recording.
Instead, it was fragged with all the other home videos and movies, my e-mail archives and tons of software. And I learned my lesson.
It's a digital world and if you don't back up your data, you risk losing it. Simple as that. Desktops and notebooks are constantly affected by OS issues, viruses and loss or theft. With all of the options out there and with the prices of backup devices steadily declining, it's irresponsible to just cross your fingers and ignore the possibility of a catastrophic loss.
But if security and peace of mind aren't enough to convince you to invest in a desktop drive, there are plenty of other reasons.
For one thing, you can never have too much space. Desktop drives expand the amount of music, movies, recorded TV and pictures you can keep, and help you avoid having to uninstall or delete things just because you want to install a new game or a new application.
And when it comes to accessing media over your home network – listening to music on a netbook in the kitchen, playing a movie for the kids upstairs or flipping through a photo gallery on the TV in the living room – there's nothing better than a networked hard drive.
The Iomega Home Media Drive is about as big as a 400-page hard cover book and its matte black finish helps it blend in with other devices on the desk.
I've spent a few weeks testing two such devices – Iomega's Home Media Network Hard Drive ($160 U.S. for the 500 Gigabyte model or $210 for the 1 Terabyte model) and D-Link's DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure ($200 – hard drive(s) not included) and have found both to be pretty good at not only protecting my data but also essentially turning my home into an always-on multimedia haven.
Network hard drives are large, sometimes expandable disk drives that you plug into your wired or wireless router. The D-Link DNS-323, for example, has two bays into which you can slide any-sized hard drives. Once they're connected, they automatically appear on your home network and whatever you dump on them is accessible from other systems in your WiFi bubble. As long as your other computers, TV or PS3/Xbox 306 game console are connected to your home network, you can enjoy your media and share files anywhere in the house or office.
And unlike sharing files from computer to computer, your main PC – the one connected to your cable or DSL modem and router – does not have to be powered up in order for you to access files on the network drive from a second PC. If you connect a printer to the network drive rather than your main computer, you can also print from any PC in the house without having to turn on your main system.
