Ken West
Last October, a power failure crashed my computer while I was installing a Windows Vista service pack update. The operating system would not boot after that and though I tried to fix the problem with help from a few Globe and Mail IT staff and Microsoft Support I ended up having to wipe my hard drive and reinstall the OS.
I lost a lot of stuff.
I had backed up my documents a few weeks earlier on a second PC in my home, and have, over the years, copied my music and pictures. But I have never backed up my entire video folder because ... I don't know. It's big, it would have taken hours to transfer everything over my home wireless network and so I didn't bother. To my regret.
One of the sub folders in My Videos had home movies, including one from Christmas, 2007, where my eldest daughter, then about 3 ½, sings You are My Sunshine. It was her favourite song. My wife and I would belt it out on car trips when my daughter cried, and it would quiet her. I'd sing it at night before bed and though my daughter knew the words, she applied a little creative substitution. Instead of singing, " You'll never know Dear..." she said: " You'll never know Daddy, how much I love you..."
Without getting too soppy, let me just say it was special and I kick myself to this day for failing to make a copy, post to YouTube, do something that would have saved that precious recording.
Instead, it was fragged with all the other home videos and movies, my e-mail archives and tons of software. And I learned my lesson.
It's a digital world and if you don't back up your data, you risk losing it. Simple as that. Desktops and notebooks are constantly affected by OS issues, viruses and loss or theft. With all of the options out there and with the prices of backup devices steadily declining, it's irresponsible to just cross your fingers and ignore the possibility of a catastrophic loss.
But if security and peace of mind aren't enough to convince you to invest in a desktop drive, there are plenty of other reasons.
For one thing, you can never have too much space. Desktop drives expand the amount of music, movies, recorded TV and pictures you can keep, and help you avoid having to uninstall or delete things just because you want to install a new game or a new application.
And when it comes to accessing media over your home network - listening to music on a netbook in the kitchen, playing a movie for the kids upstairs or flipping through a photo gallery on the TV in the living room - there's nothing better than a networked hard drive.
I've spent a few weeks testing two such devices - Iomega's Home Media Network Hard Drive ($160 U.S. for the 500 Gigabyte model or $210 for the 1 Terabyte model) and D-Link's DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure ($200 - hard drive(s) not included) and have found both to be pretty good at not only protecting my data but also essentially turning my home into an always-on multimedia haven.
Network hard drives are large, sometimes expandable disk drives that you plug into your wired or wireless router. The D-Link DNS-323, for example, has two bays into which you can slide any-sized hard drives. Once they're connected, they automatically appear on your home network and whatever you dump on them is accessible from other systems in your WiFi bubble. As long as your other computers, TV or PS3/Xbox 306 game console are connected to your home network, you can enjoy your media and share files anywhere in the house or office.
And unlike sharing files from computer to computer, your main PC - the one connected to your cable or DSL modem and router - does not have to be powered up in order for you to access files on the network drive from a second PC. If you connect a printer to the network drive rather than your main computer, you can also print from any PC in the house without having to turn on your main system.
The Iomega and D-Link devices serve a few other purposes, as well. Both can be set up as FTP servers, be configured to download files via BitTorrent and be configured to allow remote access from any Internet-connected computer in the world. Again, all of this is independent of the computer connected to your modem and router.
The Iomega Home Media Drive is about as big as a 400-page hard cover book and its matte black finish helps it blend in with other devices on the desk. A radiator-like grill covers the front and dim LED lights on the back indicate the network connection status and hard drive activity.
The D-Link box, on the other hand, is something you want to hide in a drawer, or maybe in the kitchen, considering it looks a little like a toaster. Its black and silver body is the size of a mini printer, and the bright blue light on the front blinks brilliantly in a dark room causing constant distraction. I ended up putting it on the floor.
The Home Media Drive is clearly designed for those of us who are not IT experts, though configuring it to allow for remote access, FTP or torrent activity does take a somewhat more advanced level of tech savvy. As in Iomega support. I'll get to that later. When I set up the device, all I did was connect the drive to my router with an Ethernet cable, plug in the power cord and install the software. A few seconds later, six new icons popped up on in My Computer and My Network windows.
While the Iomega drive is not partitioned, the six disk drive icons allow easy access to your content. There's one for music, another for movies, one for pictures and so on. Each individual drive can be password-protected or configured to connect to iTunes and DHCP devices. (DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, a network protocol that makes connecting something like a PS3 or Xbox 360 a cinch).
However, the total amount of data is reflected on each drive, so if you have 25GB of photos, 80GB of music and 100GB of video, each drive icon shows a total of 205GB used.
The Iomega configuration utility is a straightforward-looking Web interface and is used to configure properties and download updates. Navigating the config utility is quite easy, and you can do simple tasks such as change the name of the drive (so you see something like "Mike's Media" pop up on your other computers rather than "Iomega-376453."
Setting up the D-Link device was even easier. Plug, plug and go. The DND-323's web-based configuration utility, while not being especially difficult, looks a little more confusing the first time you log in because of the multitude of menus and options. Also, it has two separate utility pages - one for configuring the drive characteristics and another for configuring Torrent downloads and FTP connections. Still, the myriad options and functionality give more advanced users a lot of leeway to customize it.
One such customization is determining how you want the two available hard drives to interact. I mentioned above the DND-323 has two bays into which you can slide any-size SATA hard drives, so while the Iomega drives comes in two capacities - 500GB and 1TB - the D-Link drive can have two 80GB hard drives in it or two 2TB drives.
The utility allows a user to set up one of four different hard drive configurations, including Standard, JBOD, RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID originally stood for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, according to the Wikipedia explanation) and allows a user to determine what level of storage security they want to use.
There are several different levels of RAID, with each providing a different method of sharing or distributing data among the drives. The Standard config treats both disks as separate drives; JBOD combines them into one volume; RAID 0 spreads out blocks of data over both drives, which improves performance, but if one drive fails you lose all of your data; RAID 1 mirrors the data so whatever you put onto disk 1 is reflected on disk 2. That means if you have two 500GB drives, your entire capacity is 500GB, not 1TB, but if one disk fails, all your data is still intact on the other drive.
The 323 has a big brother - the 343 - which has four drive bays. (I know, imagine having 8 TB of storage :-).
The Iomega and D-Link include backup and restore software with their devices. Iomega's EMC Retrospect Express Backup and Disaster Recovery is as easy to use as the configuration utility, however, when I installed it and kept it running in the background, I kept getting pop-up messages that files were open on network drive "n" (n being a changing variable) and kept asking whether I'd like to close the drive. The only problem was the drive it identified did not exist. If I chose "No, don't close," suddenly a non-existent drive would appear in My Computer. If I chose "Yes," no extra drive would appear, but the message would pop up every half hour or so. Weird. After uninstalling Retrospect the issue stopped.
D-Link includes Farstone's DriveClone Pro, another simple backup utility. However, when I elected to clone my entire hard drive and store an image of it on the DNS-323, it only recognized my C drive, which contains my programs and operating system, and not the D drive, a 500GB hard drive I bought before Christmas to separate all of my data from the other drive.
(See? Lesson learned - if I have another crash, I can harvest all of my media from the second drive and avoid losing anymore important videos).
So I ended up using the folder and file transfer option to back the D drive up.
If have, over the past few weeks, identified a few other issues with the Iomega and D-Link devices, but let me preface the observations with something: I've been playing with gadgets and devices long enough to know that very few of them achieve 100 per cent perfection 100 per cent of the time. Like cars, even the good ones suffer from clanking this or rattling that. That, and I've found workarounds for most of the issues.
- Disappearing drives. The D-Link DNS-323 went to sleep one night and didn't wake up the next morning when I tried to access it. In My Computer, the volume drive icon showed a big red X through it. After unplugging and re-starting my wireless router and the DNS-323, it came back.
- Remote Access and Torrent sharing. While both drives support remote access from outside your home network (you can log in and access your files from a hotel room in Shanghai) the only device I could get it to work on was the D-Link. Iomega support was very polite, responded quickly to my request for an online chat and identified the issue - I needed a firmware update. The only issue was the link to the 82MB zip file containing the update on Iomega's website was not functioning. Another chat revealed Iomega was tinkering with the update, and it would be up and available by the weekend.
- Streaming to Xbox 360: While my game console recognized the new network drives easily, some movies and TV shows did not appear in the folders even though I knew they were there. Turned out I was not seeing videos encoded as Matroska files - a file format more and more HD TV shows are being encoded in. Iomega said it was an Xbox issue. Microsoft said it was a Iomega issue. However, after installing TVersity, free media server software, and adding the Iomega drive to its library, I could access Matroska files on the Iomega drive and watch them on my big screen in the living room.
Still, regardless of the minor annoyances, work-arounds and firmware update delays, I'm pretty content with the overall experience of both backup devices. Once the kinks have been worked out, these two network hard drives not only make me feel much more confident that if I ever face the same situation of having to wipe my main hard drive and reinstall the OS, I need not worry about losing the things I care about.
And, frankly, the multimedia cloud I found myself in - being able to listen to my music or have kids' movies playing in one spot and something else playing in another - was very enjoyable.