Western Digital My Book Live Provides Inexpensive NAS Backup and Sharing

June 19, 2013

At least once a week I get a call from a user who lost a product we offer because their hard drive died. No matter how many times the subject of backups is covered, users continue to ignore the suggestion to have a backup plan. Let’s make one thing clear, your hard drive is going to fail at some point. It happens to everyone.

If you don’t have a backup plan, you are going to be very frustrated trying to get all your data back. And I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t get all your data back. How many hours of work will be lost? How many of your valuable photos will be gone forever? How many calls and e-mails will you need to send to content providers to ask for replacements?

One inexpensive way to back up your system is to have a NAS (network attached storage) device like the Western Digital My Book Live. No, it isn’t a perfect solution. At its core is a hard drive that is every bit as likely to fail. But it is probably a lot better than what you have now, isn’t it? Because if you are like the majority of users, you have no backup plan at all. Below are three different sizes of the drive along with their current prices.

The prices listed above are the prices I saw on Amazon while writing this post. You may see higher or lower prices and I have no control over it. Based on these prices, there really is no reason to buy the 1TB version as you can double your capacity for only $5 more. The jump to the 3TB version is closer to $50, but may be worth it if you have more data to backup.

Along with a NAS drive, it is very important to have software that will automatically keep your files synchronized so you don’t have to think about it. I’ve been using GoodSync for quite sometime and it does such a great job that I forget it does its job every night while I sleep. Heck, I had to open it just to make sure it is still doing its job!

Those of you grumbling about paying a few dollars for such a handy utility (or a NAS drive) will also be the ones most upset when you lose all your data. So refuse to solve the problem at your own risk. All I ask is you don’t complain to me when you lose your data.

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