Let's face it when you're starting a small business the last thing on your mind is thinking about setting up a complex network of servers and routers for your business.  Most overs purchase a few laptop computers and rely on storing the files locally on those machines the problem with this is that inevitably something will go wrong and you run the risk of losing data for your business, having to call in some fresh out of high school-er from Geek Squad who can't really fix anything but suggests that you buy a backup drive for your computers.

Now all of the IT people are reading this article and cringing, because they would prefer you spend $20,000 on some super-fast server that they will for an additional fee connect all of your computers together, ensure that everything is backed up properly with multiple redundancies and a nice monthly service contract.

So as a small business owner, here you are at the table in Vegas, do you sink the $20k, accept the loss and move own as a cost of doing business or do you let it ride and gamble that all of those new laptops you bought will work just fine and that none of your employees will crash them destroying all of your files?

What if there was a better option?

Fortunately there is, we recently switched in our office to MyBookWorld II Edition.  It's a network-attached storage or NAS which is just a fancy way of saying it's a box with a hard drive in it that you can hook up to your network with an ethernet cable.   The device itself is smart and easy to setup.  It's operating system (Linux) is embedded on a chipset so you are not at the mercy of a hard drive failing.  Your data is stored on a series of two hard drives which can be setup in a RAID configuration allowing your data to be mirrored on both drives.  If one drive fails you can swap it out for another and presto the machine automatically copies your data over to the new drive with no addition configuration needed.  Just press the button to pop the lid (see photo left), unfasten a few screws and slide in the new drive.

Configuring the device is easy and can be done through any web browser from any computer on your network, just type in the name of your device, enter your login and you have full access to creating new users, setting up folders to share and managing remote access.  Yes, this little device has an FTP server built-in allowing you access to your files without having to come back to the office.

The device is both Mac and PC friendly, it automatically appears in your network list on both Windows (using Samba) and on your Mac (using AFP).  The best part is this device retails for $370 for the 2 TB version which will give you a 1 TB of RAID hard drive space and $700 for the 4 TB version which will give you 2 TB of RAID hard drive space.  And of course you can find it cheaper online too.

For the uber-geek this device also has a whole community of people that extend the device even further.  Since it's build on Linux you can SSH into the box (with a password that Western Digital smartly makes available).  With a few hacks you can turn the box into a web server, print server, MySQL database server, VPN, off-site remote backup and more.