Safe Data Storage at Home
If periodic backups seem like too much of a hassle or just too impractical for your needs, it is time to investigate real-time secure storage. These methods are more involved and tend to be more expensive but are probably the best way to go for high demand users.
The first solution we will be looking at is the use of a hard drive mirror on a local system. This is done using RAID 1, the creation of a drive array in which half the drives are an exact copy of the other half of the drives. To do this in the most basic form you simply need to buy two identical drives and install them (along with the necessary RAID drivers) on your computer. The operating system will recognize these two drives as a single drive so you can use it as you normally would, but if one drive were to ever fail the other would have the complete set of information on it. Additionally a failed drive can be replaced with another drive and the array can be rebuilt so as to seamlessly recover from a failure. RAID is very reliable and easy to use, in theory, but can a a bit of a hassle to set up with Windows, especially if you want to add it to an existing installation. The good news is that it does not require any special hardware or any periodic tasks.
Another way to go is to use Network-Attached Storage (NAS) or Direct-Attached Storage (DAS). These devices are either connected to your computer using the local network or USB/FireWire/eSATA and can be accessed as if it was another drive on the computer. There are many advantages to using these: they are separate from the computer so can be moved, their distance from the computer means that they can avoid any physical damage to the computer, they can more easily be shared by multiple computers (especially NAS), and that they often have externsive storage options, like RAID 5, RAID 10, and RAID 0+1. The downside of these is that unless you are using external SATA there will be a slow transfer speed when accessing the device so using them may cause some slow downs during work.
These two are the best options for real-time protected data storage at home but they are not the only ways to go. You can use a local data server to store information or something with more options than a NAS, like the Yellow Machine.
This article has laid out a number of options with will allow any person to put together a redundant storage solution with limited costs and not much technical expertise. The methods can be as simply as an occasional backup to using data right off of a RAID array. No solution is better than the others and they should probably be combined for the best results, but the way to go for most home users will be periodic one-touch backups because these are cheap and very easy to do. If you want something more secure and functional, a NAS is probably the best choice because it allows redundant storage to be made available to a number of users.