Lately I’ve become paranoid about my home backup strategy. I’ve realized that burning CDs/DVDs just doesn’t cut it. Not only are compact discs a lousy medium, but I’m not diligent enough to make the backups. Even when I do make backups, they tend to get lost in my house – oftentimes ending up as the coaster of a frosty mug. A Network Attached Storage (NAS) device would give me centralized backups with the added benefit of a shared storage location on my home network.

I’ve been researching NAS solutions to adequately CMA. I’ve narrowed my search down to five choices. Each of the devices will work for my needs, but they all come with their own baggage. My list of must have features along with the five devices and my perceptions of each can be found below.

Must have features:

1. Ethernet connected storage.
2. RAID 1 mirroring.
3. Less than $500 total price.
4. 1TB (500GB mirrored) of drive space.
5. Works in a mixed environment.

My choices:

1. D-Link DNS-323
   Pros
   • Good user reviews on CNet.com.
   • Scalable.
   • Fast write speed.
   Cons
   • Looks like my toaster.
   • Price. With 2 500GB SATA drives this comes close to my $500 limit.
2. Linksys NAS200
   Pros
   • The NSLU2 was a success.
   • Inexpensive. Amazon.com is selling the unit at a preorder rate of $129.99 (drives not included).
   • Scalable.
   Cons
   • Yet another ugly device.
   • Not yet released.
3. Maxtor Shared Storage II
   Pros
   • Nice design.
   • Quiet.
   Cons
   • Average price. I found this retailing for $429.99. at JR.com.
   • Bad user reviews on Amazon.com.
   • Reviews suggest that the internal drives cannot be replaced.
4. NetGear SC101
   Pros
   • Inexpensive. Retails at TigerDirect.com for $74.99 (drives not included).
   • Scalable.
   Cons
   • IDE drives only.
   • Toasteresque design.
   • According to user reviews, this device may not work in a mixed environment.
5. Western Digital My Book World Edition II
   Pros
   • Price. I found the 1TB device for $356.99 at JR.com.
   • The best looking device. It reminds me of an Apple product.
   Cons
   • Horrible user reviews on both Amazon.com and CNet.com.
   • Supposedly has a very noisy fan.
   • Reviews suggest slow write speeds.

In the midst of writing this article, I ran across a detailed comparison of NAS performance specs. I’ll definitely be reviewing this information before making my final decision. I’m also open to suggestions as long as they fit within my list of must have features.

UPDATE: My final review of the Linksys NAS200 has been posted.

Scrapbooking is my wife’s favorite hobby (stay with me). To fuel her passion, she takes hundreds of pictures at each family function with her digital camera. She edits the pictures, uploads them to yorkphoto.com, and then checks and rechecks our mailbox daily for the printed pictures. With the pictures finally in hand, she manages to combine the photos, bits of paper, stickers, and collected mementos to create a beautifully designed scrapbook page. Each page in her album is an original work. I’m constantly amazed and secretly jealous of her improving sense of design.

The Oops:

The camera my wife uses is a Canon PowerShot A80. It names each digital image with a sequential number that starts at 1 with the very first picture taken. In exploring the camera’s settings, I managed to reset the picture count. So rather than her next picture having a file name of IMG_103995837284942 it was named IMG_1. No big deal. Wrong! This messed up her entire workflow. Apparently my wife used the image’s file name as a unique identifier. Copying newly taken pictures to her working directory would have overwritten hundreds of files. Oops!

The Ahah:

To fix my blunder, I planned on renaming all of her archived images with a UUID. That way none of her images would be overwritten when adding the new pictures. Normally I would have written a bash script to handle this, but since I’d been spending some time with Ruby I thought I’d take the opportunity to learn from my mistake. It worked! The code from my image renaming script can be found below.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'uuid'

file_path = '/home/wifename/Desktop/Pictures'
destination_path = '/home/wifename/Pictures'
file_types = ['jpg', 'jpeg', 'gif', 'png', 'xcf']

Dir[file_path + '/*.*'].each do |file|
    file_extension = file.split('.').last.downcase
    if file_types.include?(file_extension) then
        file_name = UUID.new
        File.rename(file, destination_path + '/' + file_name + '.' + file_extension)
    end
end

puts 'Finished...'

With the above script, I was able to undo my mistake and learn while doing so. Now if only she didn’t have to use the command-line to run the code. Does anyone have experience with widget toolkits in Ruby? If so, contact me.

A question was asked a few weeks ago within the blog community that I read. “What are the three things you learned about software in college?” I’d like to expand upon this question and ask, “What life skills have benefited your software the most?”

I will try to keep my list short.

1. Reading Comprehension. Not everything can be solved with a Google search. You may have to open a book once in a while.
2. I’m often heard saying that the single most valuable skill that I learned in high school was typing. This needs no explanation.
3. Writing is not unlike programming. Obey grammar rules and write clearly.
4. The developer lifestyle is not glamorous. If others tell you to get a life then you probably should. Take up a hobby that involves other people. Get a job in retail.

What life skills would you put in your list?