What are you storing your 1’s and 0’s on? I’ve got simple mirroring (RAID 1) going on in the primary home computer but long for a massive inexpensive NAS (with raid), as I have run out of space, and refuse to lose data when I lose a drive. The Buffalo product is probably as cheap as building your own linux box, setting up RAID and sharing out the filesystem, unless you have some spare parts lying around. In fact, the Buffalo is based on linux. I think this will be a big industry, very soon, as these devices become more affordable and people learn their value. My prediction is that the HDD vendors will start coming out with home NAS products this year. I mean, who isn’t burning their entire CD collection to disk right now to stream directly to the squeezebox? Plus with the advent of the digital photograpy revolution, who can afford to lose all their data? Not me. But even with home raid, there is still the chance of fire, flood, or theft, which makes raid pointless. Yep, you need long term off-site backups. There are a few internet solutions now, but nothing that looks too tempting, although 10gb for free is pretty neat considering the average hard drive in a computer wasn’t much bigger than that 5 or so years ago. In the future, I bet we’ll all have this sort of thing.

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