Protecting Your Files with a Fireproof Safe



By Steve Bush

As an amateur photographer, I take a lot of pictures. Recently, I completely converted to digital photography because now digital cameras and photo printers produce high quality results. Before digital, I archived my photos as negatives or slides. Today, all of my precious photos are stored digitally on my hard disk. Like most people, I don't have the time to insert writable CD's or DVD's to backup these photos on a regular basis. I tried an online cloud backup service Connected DataProtector but over time I had to bump up my plan to $279.95 per year. I needed a better solution that met my requirements:


The solution was to purchase a fireproof safe with an internal power strip and host a network attached storage (NAS) device in the safe. Using HomePlug Powerline (Ethernet over powerline), I connected the NAS device in my fireproof safe to my home network. I then created nightly backup jobs to copy modified files from the PC's in my home network to the NAS device in my fireproof safe. The big ticket item is the fireproof safe which I had already planned to buy.

In figuring out a backup solution, the key challenge was how to protect against data loss and fire damage without consuming all the bandwidth into my home or basically paying for a small-business quality cloud backup service. To get started, here is the parts list for my fireproof safe backup solution:


Assuming you've purchased everything on the parts lists, here's how to setup your own Fireproof safe backup system.

  1. [Purchase the parts.] It usually takes a couple of weeks for the safe to be installed. You can set up everything else and move the NAS device into the safe when it arrives.
  2. Connect the Maxtor One Touch II 200 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive directly to your PC. Follow the instructions included with the external hard drive to verify it works properly when connected to the PC. NOTE: don't copy any data to the hard drive because the NSLU2 will need to reformat it to a Linux file system.
  3. Have the safe delivered and installed. Connect the powerstrip in the safe to an electrical outlet.
  4. The next step is to configure the network inside the safe. Follow the Powerline instructions to connect the first Powerline adapter to the powerstrip in the safe. I connected a switch to the Powerline adapter to test network connectivity using my laptop.
  5. Next, connect the second Powerline adapter to a power outlet near your network router or switch. Connect a network cable from your router or switch to the Powerline adapter. Configure the Powerline adapter using the software it comes with. The software creates a private encrypted network over your power lines between Powerline adapters.
  6. Go back to the safe. At this point, I verified my network connectivity by plugging in my laptop to the Powerline adapter and making sure I could get a valid IP address
  7. Connect the NSLU2 to the network inside the safe. Connect the Maxtor drive to the NSLU2. If you've done everything correctly, you should be able to open the web admin page on the NSLU2 in a browser window.
  8. Follow the NSLU2 instructions to format the drive and create a "backup" share.
  9. Create a batch file to xcopy files from your PC's to the \\NameofNASDevice\Backup. I used a copy program called Robocopy which ships as part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit.
  10. Use the task scheduler to run this batch file nightly. You can create a new task on Windows XP (and above) by going to the root \\mypc and clicking on Scheduled Tasks.
  11. You should be done!


One of the challeges I faced was how to easily organize access to the information I wanted to backup on my home network. I used the "Shared Folders" feature of Network Magic to set up the Windows file shares. Then I right-clicked on a folder that I wanted to backup, to share it out locally, and I added this shared folder to my batch file. Now, the contents of the folder automatically get backed up.