I have a home computer network. Duh! That should not come as a surprise. I have written many times about my computer escapades. I have had a personal network from the time the components were first available.
My router/switch has a USB port where I can connect an external hard drive. I have never used the feature as I had no real need for a slow external hard disk on the network. That changed yesterday. I acquired a used 500 GB USB drive (shown) and immediately realized I had a place to use it.
It was literally plug and play to add it to the network. I now have a fairly large file server available to all my devices on the network. In a few keystrokes Win 7 mapped the dive to my main computer and the new drive is always there. My Linux box had no problem finding it and saving files to it and I can map the drive to it too. It is so nice when it all works this easy.
I allow the net drive to spin down when it hasn’t been accessed for awhile. I think it is built into the driver as I didn’t have to set that feature. I don’t like to keep a drive like that running when I don’t need it.
So it is a bit slow, a couple of seconds for spin up when I hit it after a period of non access. But otherwise it is a very good drive with decent LAN speed transfer when running. It’s USB 2.0 so I would not use it (or any LAN drive) for video editing. This dive will be excellent for backup (BU) and storage. It is also the best place to put “shared” files for other users and computers. I plan to keep a lot of my BU photos on the drive.
I have a three terabyte hard drive for backup on my Windows box. I recently accidentally loaded it to the max by running Adobe LightRoom to create a new photo directory from all the photos it could find on my computer. I didn’t notice a recursive loop in the search were it could copy from itself, to itself, looking for new photo files. I left it run unattended for a very long time because I knew it was a slow process. It proceeded into a loop and wrote itself to death. It didn’t physically harm the drive, but it crashed all the formatting partitions.
All it would let me do is reformat the drive and lose everything there. Lucky me it was 90% stuff that was only there as a copy. Everything else was not critical.
Now I have one additional and fairly large storage drive not associated with internal PC computer drives or an Internet connection. More is better.
I do use “Dropbox”, OneDrive and Apple iCloud Drive for redundant backup and I feel they are about as failsafe as it can get. In reality I can see when there is an internet connection; these remote “services” are just about all that most users may need for safe storage.
With active online backup and storage, floppy disks and tape drives are near dead for the small user. It won’t be long before CD/DVD/BR Back Up also become extinct. I have an AWS Cloud account and it is clearly evident where secure and long term archiving is headed for the big boys. It is called Amazon Glacier. I am sure other services will or do have the equivalent. Glacier is fully scalable and I could certainly use it for my little piece of the cloud if I had the need.
I think the real question is who and what we trust with our data safekeeping.