Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, Fourth Edition

Network Storage Devices

So far I've talked mainly about locally connected devices—hard drives that connect directly to a Mac via FireWire, USB, or eSATA, and optical drives attached to your Mac. But you can also back up your Mac over a network. One way to do this is to use a hard drive designed to be used directly on a network without being attached to a computer. They come in three main varieties:

• NAS Devices: NAS, or network attached storage, typically refers to one or more hard drives with their own Ethernet (or wireless) interfaces, sort of minimalist file servers. (Increasingly, they're simply called "network drives" or "Ethernet drives.")

  Apple's Time Capsule is a type of NAS device, but because it has some unique features, I discuss it separately ...