There was a product announcement today that’s relevant to the posts on backup that I’ve been doing:
http://iosafe.com/products-n2-overview
I have been a big fan of the Synology NAS operating system, and this announcement says that it will be available on a third party NAS box that’s fire, shock, and water resistant. That’s good news. However, using this product as a local backup won’t mean that you should forgo the off-site backups I’ve been advocating. There are still ways that you could lose data stored on this new NAS box. A power supply failure could fry the disk electronics. Although the data on the platters would likely be unaffected, you’d have to send your disks away to get it back. User error or software problems could overwrite the data. There might be a disaster that prevented you from getting to the box afterwards, at least for a while.
For all those reasons, and probably several that I haven’t thought of, you might decide that, since you have to do off-site backup anyway, there’s no advantage in a local ruggedized NAS box. Still, it’s nice to have alternatives, and it doesn’t look like ioSafe is charging too much of a premium over an ordinary NAS offering.
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