Sharing data around the office or home
Here at the Clarihon offices in ‘Chateau RFG’, like a lot of people, we share our data.
We could have set up access between the hard disks on each of our PCs or we could have set up a ‘server’ machine in one of our offices and accessed it via our wired and wireless network. For a while we had selected the latter solution and I had a second box-tower PC sitting by my desk. It helped keep me warm in the winter but too hot in the summer and always added to the noise levels – even with quiet fans and silencing foam inside it.
A better solution, I think, is to use a Network-attached storage (NAS) unit. It’s a box holding one or more hard disks (the same sort you have in your PC) and sits on an office or home network. The disks are accessible through the usual Windows/MAC file interfaces and act as additional ‘drives’ on your PC. The data is accessible from all PCs on your network unless you restrict access using the security tools they have. Some also have media streaming capabilities built in so that you can play MP3 files, video clips and photos using remote ‘media players’ around the office/home.
We’ve got the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo box. It holds two disks with capacities from 100Gb to a Terrabyte (1000 Gb). If you ‘mirror’ them like we do you have a good measure of protection from a disk failure. This means that all data written to the box is written to each of the two disks identically. If one fails you can replace it without losing the data. By connecting an external disk drive via it’s USB port we can schedule regular automatic backups too – just to be extra safe.
There are many different makes and versions available from specialist PC companies to PC World. Our regular sources (www.scan.co.uk and www.ebuyer.co.uk) both supply a wide selection of them.
