Corporations already use such devices, which are called NAS, for “network-attached storage.’’ You just plug a NAS server into the network. Now you can store all your crucial data on the NAS box, which shares it with all the other computers on the network. It works just as well on the network you’ve set up at home as it does for big companies.
A NAS is perfect for data backups. You can even buy one with multiple hard drives and program it so that if one of the drives breaks, all your data will survive. And NAS boxes for the home are suddenly cheap; priced at $500 or more a couple of years ago, they’re now hitting the magical mass-market price point of $200.
Buffalo makes a variety of home and business NAS systems, but the CloudStor is especially attractive because of extra software that turns it into a personal Internet server. Store your stuff on a CloudStor, and as long as you have you have got Internet access, you can get to your data from anywhere.
CloudStor sells on Amazon.com for $146.99 or $199.99, depending on drive capacity. The device is a small, black plastic box that contains a standard desktop computer hard drive, one or two terabytes in size. The drive snaps out for easy replacement. There’s also room for a second drive, so for another $100 or so, you can double the CloudStor’s capacity.
But there’s a smarter way to use that second drive. CloudStor’s built-in software gives you the option to treat it as an emergency backup. When you add files to the device, an exact copy is saved to both drives. That way, if one of them fails - and hard drives eventually fail - you lose nothing. Just remove and discard the bad drive and shove in a new one, which is automatically reloaded with your data.
