The biggest advantage of storing files in the cloud is that they are available anytime, anywhere.
An external hard drive or USB stick can be lost or damaged. Keeping your backup in the cloud is a good and future-proof alternative to physical data storage, instead of an external hard drive or USB stick. March 31st is WorldBackupDay: the day to prevent data loss! Online Backup Services Go through the steps below and read how you can easily secure your files via backups and how you can improve the security per device and solution. Get started today with one of the solutions below to better protect your data! Create at least one Backup on #WorldBackupDay! Especially considering that other “simple” solutions exist which don’t restrict you at all.We’re already well on our way, but now it’s time to actually take action.
But sometimes the “simple” solution restricts your options too much. We understand the desire to keep things simple. Or, if you’re even slightly technical, find a tutorial on the web and set it up yourself. All you need to do is hire a college kid for an hour to set it up.
Any Windows machine is capable of working as a basic server. But that’s simply not true, especially for small offices that have less than half a dozen users – the offices that are attracted to NAS drives. You see, we tend to get caught in the mindset that network file sharing requires a full-fledged server. It will also allow you other options that probably aren’t available on a NAS drive, like Cloud-based backup and storage services. It’s probably about the same price as a NAS drive, has hardware that’s at least as good, it will perform just as well, and it will still allow you to use search. Buy a mid-range Windows desktop machine and make it your file server. But your options at that point are limited to one single service that almost no-one else uses. True, many NAS drives bundle their own cloud storage service.
You can’t install these services on a NAS drive. Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, SugarSync … these services have revolutionized your ability to access your files anytime you want from anywhere. You’re stuck using whatever backup utility comes on your NAS drive (unless you run the backups from another computer).Īnd how about a more current example – cloud storage. When does that matter? Well, let’s take backup for example.
No Support for Third-Party Programs and Servicesįinally, because of the closed nature of the NAS drive’s operating system, you can’t install any software on it. So if that matters to you, forget about a NAS drive. You cannot search network files that don’t reside on a Windows machine. Not only that, searching network files and sharing network indexes is transparent and automatic … as long as the network files are on a Windows machine.Īnd there’s the drawback. Powerful, unobtrusive, and keeps its indexes constantly current. You see, FileCenter uses Windows Search as its search engine. But if you plan on being able to search your files, it does matter. Why does this matter? In many cases it doesn’t. Let’s actually flip that statement around: the vast majority of NAS drives don’t run Windows. Recall that the vast majority of NAS drives run some form of UNIX. The second drawback should give you more pause. But we will say that when users contact our Technical Support complaining that FileCenter’s running painfully slow, as often as not, they’re using a NAS drive. Of course, you can’t generalize all NAS drives this way, and some do run on fast hardware. On your cheaper NAS drives, the hardware might not be any more powerful than you’d find on a low-end laptop computer. Like we said, UNIX can be optimized to run on very low-end hardware, and that’s often what you get. There actually are three potential drawbacks to a NAS drive, one of them minor and the others quite significant.įirst, NAS drives often run on slow hardware. So Are There Any Drawbacks to NAS Drives? UNIX is the operating system of choice because of its stability, its low hardware requirements, and its ability to be customized and fine-tuned to very specific tasks. What sort of computer is it? Typically, these NAS drives run some flavor of UNIX – often LINUX. And the handling of users and user permissions has to involve a computer. And the networking has to be performed by a computer. In reality, though, that NAS drive is a full-fledged computer – a very compact, very specialized server in a tiny box.īut if you think about it, that makes sense.
So it’s easy to think that a NAS drive is, in fact, simply a network disk drive that all of your machines share.
First, let’s get under the hood of a NAS drive to understand exactly what’s going on.įrom the outside, a NAS looks like a robust disk drive.