From Photo Backups to My Own Cloud Server: My Trip Into Home Data Storage

The clock started ticking three years ago when I learned Drobo was going out of business. That name not ringing a bell? Drobo made external storage devices that bundled hard drives into an easy, set-it-and-forget-it RAID configuration for people like me who wanted to keep our data safe and in one place.

My family bought one in early 2009, when my daughters were little, and we were concerned about protecting all the baby photos and videos we'd collected. The Drobo, with its four hard drive bays, seemed like a good place to park our media and other data in addition to creating online backups using Google Photos, iCloud and Flickr as our off-site protection.

For the next 17 years, the Drobo never failed us. It wasn't fancy, it wasn't attached to any network, and its USB 2.0 and Firewire ports were soon left behind by devices with faster connections. But as reliable, if slow, external storage, it did the job and was a stalwart under-the-desk companion. Although network-attached versions of my device and competitors eventually put this type of storage on home networks, the Drobo was a preview of what the marketplace would look like in about 15 years. Network-attached storage devices, or NAS, would become more attractive, easier to set up and use and increasingly important for those who want to wrangle and use their data in addition to backing it all up.