When you leave your office for the day (even if it’s a home office), do you know your data will be safe when you return? Many users are notoriously bad at backing up their data at all. Fewer users backup their data as robustly as they should. Yes, I’m guilty myself of not doing as much as I should. Today we’ll talk about a NAS drive that can help you create more secure backups. Yes, there will be an Amazon link that earns me a tiny commission if you buy something.

If you back up your data somewhere, that’s a good start. Maybe it is a USB thumb drive or a portable hard drive. They are certainly better than nothing. But what happens if they fail and you don’t know they’ve failed until it is too late? Now you are still without your data. That’s one reason why a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive is a good investment.

There are many NAS drives on the market and I’ve selected the Asustor AS5304T as it is a good choice for a small/home office. It has four drive slots and you’ll need to buy the hard drives for those slots separately. This allows you to choose the capacity of the drive. About a month ago I wrote about the Seagate IronWolf 4 TB drive and it would be a good option for this NAS.

As part of the setup, you can select the RAID configuration you prefer. This is extremely important. Depending on your choices, one or more of the drives in the NAS could fail and you would not lose any data. Just replace the failed drive and the NAS will regenerate what was on it. While it is possible you have multiple failures in the NAS, it is unlikely to happen without giving you a chance to replace a drive.

An added benefit is that you have the ability to access the NAS drive remotely over the Internet. Yes, the viability of this depends on the Internet speed in the drive’s location and where you are trying to access it. It is secure so that hackers don’t get your data. But it is perfect if you have gone somewhere and didn’t bring the file or files you need. Just access the drive and get the data remotely. It is like your own personal Dropbox.

Yes, you’ll need to make a bit of an investment to purchase the NAS drive and the hard drives to put in it. But once it is setup, you’ll be able to sleep a little easier knowing that your data has another layer of safety.