Digitally Bereft Without Snapshots?

We all have heard the warnings that follow the blue screen of death. Did
you back up?

With storage getting cheaper by the gigabyte, storage makers are making
it all too easy for consumers to back up their data with a sophistication
once reserved for businesses.

Amid the explosion of digital media — photos, video and music — chewing
through a hard drive these days, storage providers see dollar signs. But are
consumers ready to buy into the kind of network attached storage
(define) once reserved for businesses?

Seagate thinks so. So does HP, NetGear and a slew of online storage
providers. They’re just waiting for more home networkers to pony up. And there is plenty to choose from.

Take NetGear’s SC101 backup unit for shareable, fail-safe network storage with automatic, continuous backup, which enjoys solid word of mouth.

Listing for $149 with a street price just under $100, this network attached storage device is powered by proprietary software called Z-SAN, developed by a company called Zetera.

Z-SAN software has much in common with more expensive offerings in
the high-end data center class of SAN (define). Using the standard network
protocol IP, Z-SAN packages your data for a trip across your local-area
network to the SC101, then back again. This gives a computer the ability
to add more storage, and also to MIRROR (define) disks within the SC101 network device, or across separate SC101 units.

Not only that, multiple computers can access the SC101 at the same
time, providing they are using Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Seagate, for example, offers the Maxtor Shared Storage II network-attached system (NAS), which not only comes in a 1TB (define) capacity. (A terabyte is about 1 trillion bytes; that’s a lot of space.) It also offers single-drive systems providing 320 gigabytes (define) or 500 GB of space to store and share digital content on a home or small office network.

The Maxtor Fusion combines the Maxtor high-end 500 GB drive with
special software from Fabrik. The unit comes with a disk, and a higher price tag too, up to $800 at retail. But it’s more than a simple storage device.

Using a browser to access AJAX (define) routines, you can populate and surf to
this device with music, video, photos and more: sort of like having
Rhapsody, YouTube, and Shutterfly combined on your desktop. It also has a
built-in Web server that lets you access your photos, videos and music, not
only from your local area network, but with the proper settings on your
router and a little set up, from anywhere in the world.

The marketing pitch goes something like this: You can wow and amaze your
friends with music tracks, video from the wedding and photos of the holidays
all from a box that fits in your hands.

Mike Cordano, the CEO and co-founder of Fabrik, said he was trying to
create a unified personal storage appliance when he came up with the Maxtor
Fusion. “What we really were after is creating a unified personal storage
management environment that allows people to manage all of their personal
contact of any media type, accomplishing two goals: both storage and
sharing.”

Online Backups, and More

Next week, Fabrik is reaching out to more consumers who may be bereft of backup by extending the functionality of the Maxtor Fusion service with a new service called “MyFabrik Lite.” Unlike its “MyFabrik” storage service, this one’s free.

Both allow you to store, share and organize, also to embed personal media into other services, such as MySpace or a blog, for example. If you go with the free version, and submit to advertising, you get up to 1 GB for online storage. The paid version, which provides up to 100GB, is available for 49-cents per month.

“While many users are looking for a place to store and access their
files, there are an increasing number of scenarios when people simply need a
service to host and deliver content,” said Cordano

Other companies such as Memeo are turbo-charging their network-attached storage offerings for consumers with enhanced security.

Memeo calls it AutoBackup 2.0. It provides users with “hands-free” back-up and secure access to your content zipping across the Internet. The company teamed up with D-Link to integrate 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.