Spikes in electrical voltage are often referred to as “surges” in power. These power surges of high voltage can cause unwanted damage to electronics and appliances that cannot handled a voltage that is larger than what the components are rated for.

A surge protector or surge suppressor is designed to decrease or limit the amount of voltage that supplies your computer electronics or hard drives by way or one or more methods. This includes the blocking of the surge or shorting the surge to ground. Many times a surge is caused by a lightning strike during a thunderstorm or severe weather.

What Can I do to protect my electronics and data?

For many consumers, the idea of protecting or preventing electrical surge damage has been a guessing game. Buying surge protection equipment generally isn’t too high on the “To Do” list and that said there are many ways that you can protect your entire house from damage.

Be happy, even if lightning strikes :) By implementing a plan to prevent data loss from a computer crash as a result of a surge or lightning strike you'll save yourself a big headache down the road.

One solution is to buy a surge protector power strip for every bit of electronics in the house from your HD television set to your iPhone, iPad and laptop computer. While this isn’t the most realistic scenario, it might work for you and it’s certainly better than zero surge protection in your house.  If you don’t have power strips with surge suppression do you unplug every appliance and  gizmo during a storm? Of course not, you don’t have the time or care to get shocked!

Another method is to rely on your homeowner’s insurance policy to cover losses, but this is less than ideal. While insurance coverage is necessary, it’s not the right thing simply rely on taking your losses against your deductible. The best solution is to improve upon your surge protection insurance policy from lighting by preventing surge damage before it happens with SurgeAssure whole house surge protection.

Surge Protection Systems

How does a whole house system work? Well, it’s a series of protectors that work in conjunction with each other. Often called Zoned or Zones protection, your entire home, the appliances such as TV, oven, microwave and washer and dryer will all become protected from lightning damage and lightning strikes.

Data Loss on your computer hard drive can occur from a surge or lightning strike.

How SurgeAssure Works

1.       First, surge protectors are applied and installed to the incoming electrical, cable/satellite, and telephone utility services to keep externally generated surges from entering your home. This step ensure that you have a primary surge protection in place where most damage enters the home.

2. At key locations throughout your home, localized secondary surge protection is installed to safeguard against any residual surges from the main electrical service and any internally generated surges.

At the heart of a whole home system is a breaker panel protection system, telephone line protection, cable internet and cable tv protection, and then outlet surge protection for electronics, hard drives, computers and more.

By the Numbers

According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) the  direct annual structural lightning losses at $138.7 million as averaged over 1989-1993 (13). This information came from the nation's fire chiefs, who also reported 20,000 lightning-caused residential fires. Surge damage can be caused by lightning and claim costs reported by State Farm Insurance Co. in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah have been extrapolated to national figures indicating  there to be 307,000 separate lightning claims totaling $332 million annually.

In closing, no one wants to have any type of loss or claim with their insurance company. The smart choice is to take extra steps to protect your home and possessions, electronics and that precious computer hard drive from damage with surge protection from SurgeAssure.

It's true.... many moons ago ioSafe manufactured a NAS storage device called the ioSafe R4. This network attached storage server could house up to 4TB of storage and provided the end user with all of the bells & whistles you would expect from a NAS including RAID, hot swap hard drives, remote administration and even a built-in backup manager. Alas, ioSafe no longer makes the ioSafe R4 but there are still many ways in which you can reap the benefits of a NAS and still get the fireproof & waterproof protection that ioSafe is famous for.

NAS meet ioSafe. ioSafe meet NAS.

At our office we recognized many years ago how important RAID is to our own data

The ioSafe R4 was a 4TB NAS that was fireproof & waterproof. This product is no longer available.

backup strategy. We value redundancy and multiple backup copies of client information, databases as well as Exchange and .PST files. We also recognized that the missing link was disaster protection. What if the hard drives crashed or a fire ripped through our building. The simple solution was to connect the ioSafe hard drive directly to the NAS. It may sound elementary ( and it very well is) that for $500-$1,000 small businesses could now afford a solid data backup plan that may very well keep them in business should disaster strike.

Our Setup

In our office we have an Exchange server, ReadyNAS 1100, ioSafe Solo and the first generation ioSafe S1 (the ioSafe S1 is no longer manufactured).

We run a mixed environment with a combination of PC and Mac. [Our graphic designer prefers the Mac platform for all of the wonderful imagery you see on our website today - thank you Mr. Maximumedia :) ]  The ReadyNAS 1100 acts as our office file server with seven (7) workstations connecting to it on a daily basis. The ioSafe Solo is directly connected to the ReadyNAS and we utilize the built-in backup manager to backup our RAID 1 hard drives to the ioSafe. This set-up gives us TRIPLE REDUNDANCY, fire protection, water protection as well as the best in class ioSafe Data Recovery Service (DRS) with up to $5,000 of forensic recovery should our ioSafe hard drive break for any reason, no questions asked.

Cost

As the cost of storage has dropped tremendously in the last few years you can now get an ioSafe + NAS for as little as $500.00. A quick Google search reveals that the ReadyNAS Duo can be found for under $160.00, add in 2 x 1TB hard drives for $55 each and an ioSafe Solo starts out around $150.00.

Total Cost of NAS + ioSafe TODAY: $420.00

Shown above is the ioSafe S1, 1st Generation fireproof hard drive from ioSafe. This product has been replaced with the ioSafe Solo and ioSafe SoloPRO.

Several years ago when we first implemented our setup the price was much higher with the ReadyNAS 1100 priced at $2,300 and came with 4 x 500GB hard drives. Toss in the ioSafe S1 at $3,000.00 and you were digging deep into your pockets.

Total Cost of NAS + ioSafe 5 YEARS AGO: $5,300.00

That's an 80% drop in cost over five years! 

Comparing the PROS & CONS

At first glance combining the benefits of NAS storage and an ioSafe hard drive may seem confusing (especially to small business owners that are not IT or tech junkies at heart). However when you start to break down the benefits and compare apples to apples there is a tremendous value to the SMB to implement this or a similar data backup plan.

PRO's

RAID. RAID. RAID. Yes, the value of redundancy cannot be emphasized enough and multiple backup copies are always better than one.

Standby Hot Spare - with a 4 disk RAID set up you can run two (2) hard drives in a RAID 1 (mirrored backup copies) and have an extra hard drive on standby in case one of the drives in the RAID crashes. The standby drive will automatically kick in and begin making a backup

Remote Access - With the NAS in your backup loop you have access to your business data without sending it to the cloud where it may be subject to more risk than it might be worth. We'll leave that up to you to decide.

Disaster Protection - fire, flood, accidental deletion, you name it and the ioSafe DRS has you covered with no questions asked. It's remarkable that ioSafe is the only hard drive manufacturer that offers this service with their product.

CONS

More Equipment - yes, with this setup you must now purchase two (2) pieces of equipment. For many small businesses or mom & pop shops extra equipment is often a no, no.

Price Points - While many of our readers with say that the ioSafe + NAS set up is a cheap way to get data protection they are presuming that every business has the same cash flow as they do. The reality of the small business world is that budgets are tight and most of the time non-existent until year 3,4 and even year five.

To sum things up if I could help all of our small business clients implement the ioSafe + NAS system I would. This setup works very well for the majority of our clients and without a doubt a mixture of brands still achieves the same goal. Whether it's a Seagate BlackArmor NAS, NetGear ReadyNAS, Western Digital NAS or an HP MediaSmart server the point is that combining ioSafe hard drives with network attached storage is a very wise choice for the small businesses around the world.

Peace of Mind for the Entire Family

Your data is the most important data in the entire world and you deserve the best hard drive to protect it from disaster. For years, ioSafe, Inc. has been engineering and manufacturing the best brand of external, portable as well as internal hard drives for your home and business. Whether you need a fireproof hard drive as part of your business continuity or disaster recovery plan or simply want to protect your family photos, video or music files, ioSafe has a hard drive for you.

Learn more about the entire family of hard drives from the ioSafe Solo, ioSafe SoloPRO and the new Rugged Portable Mobile Hard drive.