ioSafe Solo and a Windows Home Media Server

The ioSafe Solo external USB hard drives offer great value per gigabyte when compared to regular brands of disk drives. Fire and flood protection are a vital element to any backup, storage and recovery plan, now for little more than the cost of a regular external backup device you can get priceless fire and flood insurance for your digital family photo albums and business data

The following is an excerpt from Home Server Hacks and Microsoft MVP Donavon West

Creating a WHS disaster recovery plan

How can you effectively use the ioSafe Solo as part of your Windows Home Server disaster recovery plan? As far as I see it there are two approaches that you can take:
Plan A

With this approach, you build a system comprised of a standard SATA system drive and use two or more ioSafe USB drives for data storage. With data duplication turned on, you will have all of your files (minus re-creatable system files) stored on disaster proof drives. If you ever experienced a fire, the WHS would be destroyed (you can rebuild that), but all of your data will be secure.

Once the ioSafe drives are back (you need to send the charred remains back to ioSafe to be recovered), simply plug them in, rebuild the system drive using the system recovery DVD and you are back in business my man!

Plan A is more costly (requiring multiply ioSafe drives) but provides complete protection for all of your data. Note that because you entire system (minus the system drive) is running on USB connected drives, the data throughput speed will not be as snappy as on internal SATA systems.
Plan B

The other less costly approach is to build up a standard system utilizing standard drives, like the one you probably have right now. Power Pack 1 introduced a feature that will let you backup certain high value shares to an external hard drive. Plan B would make that external hard drive a fireproof/waterproof ioSafe Solo drive.

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File Serving with the ioSafe Solo - USB to FTP

Excerpt taken from
Serving your External Hard Drive

I just wanted to add a short tutorial for those of you who think that having your files accessible no matter where you are is an interesting alternative to carrying around that scratched and battered jump drive. Actually, mine has crapped out more than a few times and can have problems being mounted on older computers and PCs. Yeah, I'm a Mac guy...

So, my ioSafe Solo rugged hard drive is what I use as backup for all of my important home files, designs, posters, photos, music, etc. All the stuff that pays the bills. So, it must remain on and connected to my LAN (local area network) anyway. I figured I'd just open the LAN up to the world and serve my stuff wherever I need to work; meaning essentially I can transfer files from my backup drive to whatever office(s) or domicile(s) I will be located during the course of a day and vice versa. Intriguing, eh?

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Self Service Pricing

New pricing is now in effect for all ioSafe hard drives and systems and the good news is that pricing has been lowered on all enterprise class systems. Included with every purchase of an ioSafe R4 or ioSafe S2 is a FREE Solo USB external hard drive (500 GB) valued at $199.99.

You can get a Self-Service Price Quote for ioSafe disaster proof hardware equipment without having to contact a sales person or fill out a long form complements of HDDFireSafe.com. HDDFireSafe, A Division of K.L. Security Enterprises, Inc uses a service called EchoQuote that provides the back-end quoting engine. Check it out. You will get your quote in seconds with no annoying phone calls.

ioSafe Solo Reviews

More and more business owners, professional photographers and music producers are finding the ioSafe Solo external hard drive to be a top performer for data backup and storage.

This ioSafe review was posted today by an independent graphic designer and music producer.

NETGEAR's RangeMax Wireless Router and ioSafe Solo Hard Drive

Adding USB external storage to your existing network is simple offers many benefits to all users of the network.

The NETGEAR RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router delivers great wireless performance for home and small business networking operations. With separate Wireless-N access points for media/gaming and data (photos, video, etc), and concurrent Dual Band N, you get reliable connections for HD media streaming, gaming, and the best Internet bandwidth. Featuring four gigabit Ethernet ports enabling maximum wired speeds, this high performance router is an ideal solution for the connected home with multiple computers and network enabled gadgets running multiple applications at the same time.

The ioSafe Solo fireproof waterproof USB external hard drive can be combined with the NETGEAR's RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router (WNDR3700) to create a safe place on any home network for all users to store data.

Apple Time Machine Backup to ioSafe Solo

Every Mac user can thank Apple for developing the Time Machine backup software. Generally speaking, setting up backup software can be quite complex when it comes to the PC world. However, Time Machine has made data backup and recovery simple and elegant.

There are several hard drive manufacturers that bundle their external drives (USB and Firewire connectivity) with Windows-based backup software and/or have built in "one-touch" or "push button backup" solutions. This type of backup process still requires some experience and knowledge for setup so that a scheduled backup process work as required (incremental, full, or file-change backup). On the other hand, Apple Time Machine, makes set-up and configuration smooth as silk. The process is nearly automatic (even my mom can set it up). When a new hard drive is connected, Apple Time Machine brings up a prompt asking whether or not the drive will be used for data backups. Keep in mind that if your external hard drive is formatted for Windows (FAT32 or NTFS), you will have to reformat the disk before Time Machine will be able to use it for backup.

Time Machine will keeps daily backups for the last month, and maintains as many weekly backups as will fit on the chosen backup drive. All that said, the ioSafe Solo works flawlessly with Apple Time Machine backup software. You'll be able to setup automated backups into a fireproof and waterproof rugged hard drive for little more than the cost of any regular hard drive.

How to Make a USB External Hard Drive into NAS

Have you ever wondered how you can use your external hard drive as Network Attached Storage (NAS)? The process really isn't that complex and with a few pieces and parts you can easily backup to a 'brand new' NAS device (or pseudo-NAS device:)

One of the easiest ways of connecting USB hard drives, external drives or a thumb drive to the network is with Belkin's N+ Wireless ADSL2+ Modem-Router. With this simple plug and play device you can store and share media content, photos, digital music and video files from the USB hard drive to every computer on the network. The N+ router is based on the draft 802.11n 2.0 technology which provides the wireless range to easily cover a large home or office

Another easy way to make your USB hard drive into a NAS is with the LinkSys Dual-N Band Wireless Router. This award winning USB to NAS router has been touted by PC Advisor as a Best Buy and by Laptop Magazine as Editors Choice. This Cisco/LinkSys router is made for for speed and optimized for media. Music, movies, gaming: whatever you’re into, Dual-N Band Wireless Router delivers double the bandwidth and media-optimized performance so you can enjoy it more smoothly, with less lag, all around your home. Easy to use and setup, this router also includes a Mac computer setup wizard.

When you take a look at a USB desktop drive versus the NAS storage there are pros and cons to each type of storage. However with the addition of network wireless router you can easily make the conversion and not hurt your wallet too much.