I have the worst luck when it comes to electronics. Both my two-year-old Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook and my month-old Western Digital Passport external hard drive failed within several weeks of each other, and as a result much of my valuable data - including all of my schoolwork over a period of a month and a half, in addition to a digital photo collection I have been keeping since fourth grade - was lost. Subsequently, after receiving my new MacBook, I began looking into redundant backup and recovery solutions - I did not want to risk further losing data and productivity due to future hardware malfunctions.
Mac OS X Leopard includes a built-in backup feature called Time Machine, which automatically saves the state of your hard drive (minus whatever folders you specifically set) to an external storage device. Because it saves as many backups as it can until the drive is full, it facilitates the easy recovery of deleted or modified files; all the user has to do is select “Enter Time Machine” after which he can view versions of each file in as many save points as the software has set. To use the software, I assembled a makeshift external hard drive using an old 80 GB notebook drive I had lying around and a Rosewill aluminum enclosure, which provided me enough storage space to reliably back up my documents, pictures, and music.
However, at that point I was still not satisfied - what if (God forbid) my messenger bag was stolen one day, when I had both my laptop and my backup drive with me? I needed a permanent home backup solution just in case I lost both copies of information. As a result, a few weeks ago I purchased a network-attached storage (NAS) drive, the 1 TB Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo. Featuring two 500 GB hard drives within a RAID-capable enclosure, the drive can also serve a multitude of other functions right out of the box including acting as a media server, print server, and BitTorrent client.
Setting the drive up was easy on both my MacBook and on John’s ThinkPad Windows laptop; the drive pretty much worked immediately and the only setup I had to do was reformatting the drive into a RAID 1 (redundant) array instead of the RAID 0 it arrived as. I installed the LinkStation software on my computer, which turned out to be completely useless as upon connecting the drive to my router, all of the configuration and setup could be completed using the web interface. The NAS could be reached via an SMB connection on my MacBook, and could be mapped as a network drive on John’s ThinkPad.
The LinkStation came with a CD containing the Memeo AutoBackup software for Windows, a great piece of software featuring instant, automatic syncing of user-selectable files and folders, providing a very painless backup solution capable of recovering modified or deleted files. However, no such solution was provided for Mac, and so after looking at my options online I decided on purchasing SuperDuper, which allowed me to easily and automatically perform daily backups of my data onto the LinkStation.
After getting all the backup software up and running, I began investigating the other capabilities of my drive, the most appealing of which was the media server. I wanted to be have the capability to stream video (mostly my favorite TV Shows at this point in time: Boston Legal, Grey’s Anatomy, House, and The Practice) from the drive, watchable anywhere and by anyone on my apartment’s network.
I was able to reach a usable solution surprisingly easily, through an open-source piece of software called Plex. Initially written to provide media center capabilities on the XBox, it has since been adapted for the Mac and provides an extremely¬†aesthetically pleasing, Front Row/Windows Media Center-esque interface that organizes and allows remote-controlled access to media stored on any number of hard disks or network drives that the user chooses. Although I had to rename/rearrange my video files and folders to their rigid format, “Show Title (Year) - S##E## - Episode Title”, after doing so and adding the correct folder to the library, the software immediately downloaded a background wallpaper, poster, screenshots and plot synopses for each of my TV shows and movies, presenting them beautifully in the clean, modern interface.
One feature of Plex that really appealed to me was that it is intended to be a media center, which meant that unlike QuickTime and VLC, all of the menus are navigable via keyboard. This meant that one could use a remote control - users have had success with the Apple Remote, the Logitech Harmony, and even their iPhones - eliminating the need to get up every time to play/pause/select a video, or as I had done before, using my mouse on the sofa to control the computer. Furthermore, Plex has an actual library and menu system that is significantly better than that in Front Row, which makes selecting and watching videos that much easier. 
As I have neither an Apple Remote nor a Harmony, I decided to use my iPhone to remote control the software. Following the directions on the Plex Wiki, I installed an application called Snatch on my iPhone and the corresponding server on my MacBook, which allowed me to remote control my mouse and keyboard. Snatch has a feature that allows users to create a custom interface, creating buttons and mapping them to keyboard characters or shortcuts. I subsequently designed my own remote control that could turn Plex on/off, navigate through its menus to select a video, and fast-forward/rewind during the video. For the capability to turn Plex on/off I wrote an AppleScript to check the status of the application and perform accordingly, and set a keyboard shortcut to run the script using Quicksilver.
At this point, I definitely do not regret purchasing the Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo NAS Drive - it is excellent both for backing up one’s files and for streaming media, and it is calming to know that the RAID 1 configuration makes it very unlikely that the data will ever be lost. Furthermore, Plex is a great media center software and ultimately is a pleasure to use; the beautiful interface coupled with the intuitive navigation system makes for a highly enjoyable media experience.
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