The drive is a pretty simple one. 2TB on 2×1TB drives, connected to your PC with a USB cable. I didn’t look at much of the software because as usual I don’t trust software that ships with hardware. The only software I installed was the Western Digital Drive manager which allows you to setup the 2 drives as RAID-1. The raid setup gives you some in-build redundancy which allows you to use this drive for those files you just need to store somewhere secure.

Restoring on failure

So the reason why people buy this drive is because (like me) they don’t just wonder if their drive will fail, but actually when it will fail. So when it fails, you will need to replace the broken drive with a new one. So how do we do this?

It’s actually pretty easy, as is described in both the manual and the online FAQ. Just pop up the top lid, unscrew the little thumbscrew and replace the drive. Rebuilding should take about 5 to 15 hours depending on the size of the drive, and I think that’s about right (it took me 8 hours to copy all my data to the drive to start off with).

Why this drive?

• Cheapest 2TB drive with built-in RAID-1 (£149.99 @ Currys)
• Quality brand
• Beautiful design
• USB Connection
• Simple to replace broken hard drive

Video Review

Where to buy?

£149.99 @ Currys
£166.81 @ Amazon UK
£189.99 @ Play.com
$203.02 @ Amazon US

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What is DropBox?

By now I guess almost everybody must have heard and/or using DropBox. The idea behind DropBox is simple: a folder on your computer in which you can drop files which will then be automatically synced to the web, your other computers, and any of your friends with whom you’ve decided to share the folder.

DropBox has quickly gained a lot of traction among distributed teams, who were in need of a place to store their collaborations as simply as possible. Before DropBox, people had to refer to email, ftp, or custom websites to manage their files across machines but using the cross-platform concept of folders proved to be much more flexible.

Backups

Besides using DropBox for collaboration or syncing, a lot of people seem to be using the service for keeping quick and simple backups of their most important files. I have to admit, why go through the process of creating a full disk backup, or backup to external hard drive, when you can just as well just drop the files into the DropBox folder and have it instantly synced to the web and your other machines within seconds. It’s even more interesting becuase DropBox also keeps past revisions of your files for 30 days on the free account (and unlimited on the premium account) allowing you to get back to any version you might need to in case anything goes seriously wrong.

Security

So backing up to DropBox is popular, and for good reasons, but how save is it to actually do it? It turns out we’re not the first ones asking this question and the Security Overview on the DropBox site is quite extensive. In short:

• Shared folders are viewable only by people you invite.
• All transmission of file data and metadata occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL).
• All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256) and are inaccessible without your account password.
• Dropbox website and client software have been hardened against attacks from hackers.
• Dropbox employees are not able to view any user’s files.
• Online access to your files requires your username and password.
• Public files are only viewable by people who have a link to the file(s). Public folders are not browsable or searchable.

Also, DropBox uses Amazon S3 for storage which has quite an extensive SLA and is being used by more backup services like Mozy, so I doubt their servers are going to be the issue.

Conclusion

Backing up small files to DropBox is indeed a smart use of an innovative service. Their security seems to be well thought out and the fact that their data is hosted on Amazon S3 gives me full confidence in their abilities. Their free service offers 2GB of free storage which should give you enough space for those files that you might-not-have-backed-up-somewhere-else-yet. If you want you can upgrade to a premium account which gives you 50GB ($9.99 a month) or 100GB ($19.99 a month) of storage.

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It’s finally here!

I’ve taken the moment to start this new blog on being redundant. I’ve been running with this idea for a while. Think of it as a public service: informing as many people as possible about the benefits of being redundant, and the importance of backing up any data. When did you last backup? See

I hope to get some posts up soon. The idea is simple: any hardware or software that focusses on data storage, redundancy, or similar will be reviewed; any story on data corruption or management will be covered. But for now, it’s time to get this blog further setup. I’ll be back soon!