A few months ago, I was looking to perform off-site backups for friends, and found that I could no longer do the "wholesale" backup I'd intended, as I was running out of space. After clearing out some of the more ridiculous things I was storing, I recorded a mental note to look at purchasing new hard drives for my NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, and promptly discarded the note.

A few weeks ago, I found cause to log into the interface for the NAS device, only to find that it'd been trying for a while to send me emails telling me that it'd detected a bad sector on one of my disks, and while recoverable, needed to be addressed. I cleared the errors, recorded a mental note, and promptly forgot about it again.

I was home sick most of this weekend, with not a lot to do other than sneeze and watch The West Wing. Something about the rhythmic blinking lights of the NAS reminded me to look into hard drives again, and I ended up finally purchasing the new drives.

For a $200 upgrade, I'm going to be able to:

1. Double my storage space, while still potentially maintaining the drives I have currently for "transfer" drives.
2. Fix my configuration to allow for the hardware "accelerated" folder encryption built into my device to encrypt my sensitive data to eliminate the possibility of unwanted persons gaining access to my data simply by taking out my hard drives and putting them into a computer they control.
3. Do a "live" transfer of data from the old redundant disk array to the new redundant disk array. It will be slower, for sure, while I'm doing the transfer, but in theory, I should still be able to operate on the device reasonably while the transfer occurs.

There, of course, will probably be snags along the way, but I'm posting this for everyone's benefit/edification, less so me touting my technological conquests. These types of technology are available for the consumer market, and are built to be accessible by those without extensive computer or programming-type backgrounds.

If your data is at all important to you, or your paranoia keeps you up nights thinking about what would happen if your hard drives were stolen, or destroyed, NAS-type implementations, or the equivalent automated technologies put into a home computer, make all the difference in data protection and recovery.