Where are you going to put all the digital case files you have now created? If you don’t have a secure place to store them, there is no need in creating them in the first place.

Chances are, you have some type of network in your office/home that you save data on. That’s the basic premise we use in the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. We use a server as a “traffic cop”, but you don’t really need one. We store all of our data on Network Attached Storage (NAS).

We use a series of Buffalo Terastations, that look like this:

Above is a rack mounted Terastation. If you don’t have a rack in your home or office, you can use this version:

The benefits of a NAS device are many. The short form is you have one central redundant storage location with a collective data pool that many people can connect to at once. NAS devices are also cheaper and easier to maintain than a server.

Notice the 4 hard drives in the picture above? That’s often referred to as a RAID configuration. There are many different RAID configurations, but what you really need to know is that RAID creates more than one copy of what you save to a NAS device if setup properly. Therein lies another NAS benefit; multiple backups of your important data.

Here is a simple RAID explanation using a popular NAS called the ReadyNAS Duo:

I’ve also setup 2 small local firms with the ReadyNAS Duo as their main network storage. It is relatively inexpensive, and merely shows up as another drive on any computer on your Network. You backup without knowing it. Brilliant. Amazon has a great deal on the ReadyNAS HERE. This particular NAS comes with no drives, so you can choose the storage size that best fits your office need. All of our digital case files for the last 10 years are under 40gb, but buy the largest drives you can to ensure storage for the future.

NAS devices are easy to setup, easy to use, and easy to maintain. My favorite part? No data is stored on the user’s machine, so the user’s computer is not bogged down with too much information. I can also add a new computer to our network a lot faster than the traditional method of storing data and programs on each individual user’s computer. NAS devices also create reliable backups of precious data, which we lawyers must have when storing client information. But one backup is NOT enough. More on that later.