I seem to have amassed quite a lot of personal data; digital photographs, music, manuals and course-work all adds up to a few GB. Obviously, being fond of computing, I have implemented some mind bogglingly complex – albeit sporadic – backup strategies that I don’t really understand anymore. If a key piece of hardware were to fail I’d loose it all. As good an excuse as any then for a gadget impulse buy: a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device would save the day, so I bought one last weekend.

The problems started shortly after I switched it on.  I planned to use the device for backup purposes and to support sharing of data between systems, but I had not really thought this through. The device has a single ‘large’ disk, so no complex redundancy or performance configurations to worry about, how hard can it be?

My first plan was simple – mount the drive and start copying data. The drawbacks emerged pretty quickly;  many of the data structures are ‘live’ and subject to change.  Relying on manual inspection to identify updates is not really going to scale. Thankfully, the device manufacturer was one step ahead and had kindly bundled some software. Sadly, my PC, the software and I could not get along, the PC eventually got so upset that I sent it to the naughty step to reflect on its behaviour. OK, I need way of pairing file structures and establishing a relation so that changes would be synchronized from the live ‘master’ to backup ‘slave’ structures. At this point I remembered Jon mentioning SyncToy, which seems to address my needs. Any other tools or strategies worth reviewing?