Apple in it's latest OS update added a capability called Time Machine, essentially the ability to backup your hard disk every hour and capture all the changes. This feature has been added by some third party providers to Windows based systems and in the Enterprise, Syncsort essentially delivers this capability to the Data Center. I have used Time Machine several times already to recover myself out of trouble and on my home system it protects 200GB's plus of downloaded movies as well as all about 10GB's of pictures. What I have stored on hard disk at home is almost as important as what is stored at work, and its not just pictures and movies but scanned in images of tax returns, contracts, and insurance.

While I am paranoid about the business data and that goes off-site every day, I am not as careful with my personal information. While it is backed up constantly what if my house is hit by a fire, flood or tornado? The hard drive I use to protect all my personal information could easily be destroyed. 

Enter ioSafe, makers of a Disaster Proof Hard Disk. ioSafe's patented FloSafe and HydroSafe technologies are used with the proprietary DataCast insulation and patent-pending MirrorGuard reflective enclosures to provide protection from fire or flood. I just installed one of their new 3.5" Pilot drives to protect all my personal digital assets, as well as one at the office to protect Storage Switzerland's digital assets. These drives are ideal for this type of problem. Costing not much more than an equivalent hard disk, they provide complete protection in the event of a disaster. 

From a Time Machine perspective it works perfectly. Time Machine saw the drive, allowed me to select it and immediately started backing up to it. Backup's occur every hour and the system is near flawless in execution. While I won't light my house on fire to verify their claims and I didn't feel like adding it tonight's BBQ, I did throw the unit into the deep end of my pool for an hour and, after letting it dry, it worked perfectly. If you would like a testimony to the units fireproof ability, there is an excellent video on ioSafe's website. 

While we spend a lot of time talking about Enterprise data protection and virtualization infrastructures, we all have home systems, and more than likely if you are in IT you have more than the average amount of digital data in your house. Adding an ioSafe drive to your data protection strategy gives you near bullet proof protection of those digital assets.