Yes I got that, my response was in reply to the posts taking the form, “replace it with a XXX and you will be safe”.

I was not familiar with the MSS specifically when I went searching yesterday, but a quick google search revealed hundreds of people with similar tales to tell. What really gets me is offering the option of creating a RAID mirror but not providing any tools to recover from a single failed drive. They seem to be forcing the the end user to send the unit in for expensive data recovery to get your data back. This is SCANDALOUS and really screams “class action” to me. With this business model, there is no incentive to build a quality product, quite the opposite in fact. I quickly lowered my already low opinion of Seagate/Maxtor over this.

With regard to point number one, I think the main complaint from myself and others who purchased an MSS was the fact that they failed early and repeatedly. I do accept that no piece of hardware will last forever, but I don’t accept that a product designed for this purpose (even if it is consumer grade) should last a matter of weeks.

Thanks again for the comment.

1) Everything fails eventually. No exceptions. It may be that you don’t use something long enough to wear it out, but sooner or later everything will fail. Never trust important data to a single piece of hardware or to a MANUAL backup strategy. Do not necessarily assume that a single backup is enough.

2) Data is more important than many people realize. Ask yourself if you care if you lose every bit of digital data you have at the moment. As more of our lives becomes stored in bits and bytes, it becomes more important to protect it.

3) Human nature conspires against your data. We procrastinate, we are complacent, we ignore obvious risks. Ask yourself how much data you can afford to lose, 1 hour? one day? one week? one month? and AUTOMATE a backup to that schedule. I run office backups twice a day, each stored in a different machine one on the LAN one off the LAN. Offsite backups are done once a month. Periodically I dump all hard drives to DVDs to clean things up and store two copies of the DVDs in separate locations off site. Paranoid? You bet. Protected? Absolutely. Surprisingly, even with this system, I have still lost a very small amount of data. At home I run offsite bakups daily. Frequent hardware failurs but zero data lost.

4) Itemize ALL risks to your data: fire, flood, theft, accidental deletion, virus, toddlers, spilled coffee, lightning, hackers, forgotten passwords, I bet you can think of more. If your backup system only accounts for hard drive failure, I bet none of the above risks are covered, some of which are much more likely than a hard drive failure.

5) RAID is NOT a backup. RAID is ONLY high availability, it should allow you to keep working after a certain, very specific, hardware failure. For non-business applications you can probably live without access to your data for a few hours while you restore from your carfully implemented backup plan. In an office full of people, hours of downtime is costly. They are the ones that need high availability. Both need backups.

6) Know what to do when the inevitable happens by testing things as much as possible. Simulate a drive failure or system crash or whatever when the system is not storing critical data and document the experience. Assume that you will not need to draw on this knowledge for YEARS and put the documentation somewhere where you will find it again (not on the same system). The internet is full of people begging for help too late in the process, take steps not to be another voice in the wilderness.

7) If you are a “hands on” type of person, a FAR better solution than one of these consumer NAS units is FreeNAS. Build your own NAS on a world class server platform, for less money, with more features and with a community of people that will step you thru the restore process should the unthinkable happen. It is one of the best uses for that aging PC that is pretty much on its way to the landfill.

Also, the lights on the front are confusing. The network light can be flashing away like the unit is powered up and being accessed when the internal drive itself is still unpowered and unaccessible. You have to press the button on the back to actually power up the drive after a power cycle. I suspect this shortfall alone has fooled a number of people into returning functioning drives (with their data on it).

I have not had any PSU or drive issues to date so I guess I’m lucky.

One piece of advice I have for people is to upgrade to the latest firmware which recognizes FAT16 or FAT32 partitions on your backup drive. This will make your backup drive portable between your NAS and any XP or Linux box. Create and format the partition under XP for best results.