Network storage - luxury or necessity?

Should there be a NAS in every home? Digital cameras have long been mainstream devices, but it amazes me how few people seem to backup their digital photos. The rise of the smartphone has only made the situation worse, as phones have become the day-to-day happy snapper for many people but they often forget to copy the photos across to their computer. I regularly hear horror stories of people losing months or even years worth of photos after a hard drive failed or a smartphone upgrade went sour. In the years to come you can be sure there will be lots of people with no baby photos to show at their 21st birthday after their parents lost everything in a digital disaster. There are no second chances, once it's gone it's gone. These days I think every household with more than one computer should invest in a Network Attached Storage drive, considering you’ll get change from $200 for a basic 1TB network drive. Plug it into your broadband modem via Ethernet and it’s now available to every device on your home network, like your own personal cloud. Basic NAS drives are very easy to set up and most come with basic software for automating backups from your computers. You’ll also find backup features built into Windows and Mac OS, plus a wide range of third party apps. I find automated backups are the best because they don’t rely on you remembering to do anything. When you copy photos from your camera or smartphone to your computer, you want to make sure they’re automatically copied to the network drive as a backup. Network drives are especially useful if you’ve got notebooks as, unlike a desktop, it’s not practical to leave a USB drive constantly hanging off the side of a notebook. A friend of mine has filled up the hard drive on his old notebook and was thinking about buying a USB drive for extra storage but I convinced him to spend extra on a basic network drive. Now that extra storage is available whether he’s using the notebook while sitting at the table, lounging on the couch or resting in bed. The drive is DLNA-enabled, so it might eventually be used as a media server as well. A network drive might protect against hard drive failure, but your data is still on the premises so it’s vulnerable to fire and theft. That’s why it’s also important to keep an offsite backup of irreplaceable files such as family photos. I store mine on a computer and a network drive, plus I upload them to an online storage service and also burn them to DVD which I leave at a relative’s house. I always imagined that one day every house would have a consumer-friendly server, for storing backups and streaming media around the home. Many tech-savvy people already do this, but now I don’t think it will become mainstream because the cloud will take over instead. This might be more convenient than a home NAS or server, but you’re now trusting someone else to keep your data safe. For now I still think the best strategy is to keep both onsite and offsite backups, just to play it safe. What’s your backup strategy? Have you helped less tech-savvy friends and relatives put a backup system in place before disaster strikes (or maybe after)?