I’m always telling my students that they should backup anything they want to keep and that goes for the rest of us. I always keep things in at least three places – the original computer, the cloud, and a server at the house. Over the years I’ve had several
My favorite, which I am in morning for to this day was a HP Device that ran Windows Home Server. That thing was the easiest to use. I could just stick a thumb drive in a computer, come back to it 4 hours later and it was back to whatever state I wanted it in.
But all hardware has a limited life. I still have it, but have removed the working drives, and it sits gathering dust.
My next favorite devices are also old, but still working, a Buffalo Terabyte NAS and an Iomega NAS.
The Buffalo NAS had really good customer service and good software.
Iomega was bought out by Lenovo. I haven’t dealt with customer service since they were bought out, but I do have one of the new devices:
It was easy to install and very easy to use. Since the district is very firewalled, I haven’t used any of the cloud features.
I also have a Netgear Stora, that’s quite old. I haven’t been happy with the support or reliability of Netgear devices.
The latest device I really like is the Western Digital My Cloud. Customer support is really slow at answering email, but so far, other than an issue with initially loading firm ware, it just works.
I have the 2TB, comes in a 3 and 4 version:
What I really like about this device, is that all my tablets, my Windows Phone and my IPod working with it, both at home and when I’m out and about. I keep trying to find a way to keep my extra books available to me when I’m on the road and this is it.
Very easy to use. I’m also willing to help set it up.
The most important thing about any backup solution, is that you use it. Make sure you set up a way to run your backups.
One of the things I like about Windows 8, is that you can automatically set up things so they are saved while you are on the go using Skydrive. However, I still back up my Skydrive! Especially photos. That’s what I mean about having everything in three places.