Organize and Archive Family Photos, Videos, Tax Files and More

If you're like me, there are electronic files like family photos, family videos, tax files, bank statements and so forth that I want to keep well-organized and copied for protection. I've finally found a solution that I'm happy with - Network Attached Storage - and so I'd like to share what I've done.

My house is fairly typical, I wager, where there's a netbook, a laptop, a desktop PC and a couple of older PCs still around for the children to play games on, etc. Each of these machines has one or more hard drives. At one time or another, important files like photos and such have been placed on those hard drives. Over time, I've made a mess that I'd like to clean up: I'd like to organize important files into one place that is protected from a hard drive failure.

My solution is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. In short, a NAS is a hard drive (one or more) that you can hook into your router so that all the computers on your network can see it - and read/write to it.

So a NAS can be a central file storage and archiving repository. Some NAS devices are set up by default to offer mirroring - which is the use of another drive to keep a copy - and, that way, if one drive fails, there's still a good drive.

NAS devices have been around - but lately the manufacturers have offered more devices that are taylored to average consumers for home use both in price and ease of use. That's great news!

With a NAS plugged into the router, the game changes. Local hard drives aren't as important. One can get a PC with a smaller, faster hard drive with adequate space for software installations, downloads non-essential files, etc. and the important stuff or the large media files can go on a NAS.

I purchased a NAS with two drives that are mirrored - with 1 terabyte storage capacity on each. Mirrored drives are slightly slower due to the need to make an extra copy - but I gain coverage for a hard drive failure. This will be my "archiving NAS" where I will store important family files.

Coming up, I'll get another NAS for multimedia. I can accept a hard drive failure for multimedia files (not family footage). So I can get a NAS that is not configured to copy across drives (mirroring or raiding). The name of the game for this one is speed and high capacity (lots of disk space). This NAS will have about 4 Terabyte capacity - which will do for my needs and is available now (October 2010-ish) for reasonable prices.

I'm happy with the ease of use on the NAS device I've purchased. So, I can personally recommend the Western Digital My Book World Edition II - 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) Network Attached Storage device.




Family files are important. So, along with securing against a hard drive failure (with a Mirrored NAS), I want to store a copy of critical files somewhere other than my home - so as to hedge against all those local risks - like theft, fire, natural disasters, user errors and so forth. For that, I'm planning a two-pronged approach.

For "off-site" storage of family files, I can place files disks or flash drives and have those kept with family members out of state. Also, I can keep some of those "in the cloud" on Dropbox.

In my next post, I'll discuss how a NAS coupled with an "Entertainment PC" can bring enjoyment of family photos, family videos, internet browsing and more to the high-definition television.