Motivation

Previously I collected my data in various forms and locations and quite often lost track of the exact file location. Also changes to the data were sometimes mixed, so mistakenly data which was out of date was backed up instead of the current status.
This all changed when my harddisk containing the only recent copy of everything went up in smoke. Picture all data with a new Opensuse installation, meticously customized going up in smoke on a 6 month old 1TB harddisk.
Suddenly I was aware of my necessity for a reliable place to store my data and keep recent backups.

CD and DVDs

Over time I noticed the data I wanted to save just grew and grew. I had been backing up my data on CDs and then on DVDs. But as the size of one full backup amounted to more than 20 DVDs to be burned for one set I knew it was time to change to s.th. else.

• The amount of time necessary to create a backup set was just to large.
• Due to the ISO9660 limitation to 2 GiB per file, the backup would need to split larger files into several parts - which creates extra work.
• Also due to the ISO9660 limitation of the character set some of my linux files would have to be renamed (UTF-8).

USB external HDD

The external HDD provided me with more storage but had many issues with interoperability which I consider paramount for my use.

• There is only one filesystem that can be read and written to by Windows, Linux, MacOS, namely FAT.
• All modern filesystems which I would entrust my data with - NTFS, ext3/4, reiserFS, UFS, xfs, zfs - do not interoperate via USB

Network attached storage - NAS

The advantage I see in attaching over network is the interoperability. With a NAS I am able to connect to my data from Windows, Linux, Opensolaris, MacOS.
The next task was to find an optimal NAS for my requirements.