Back to the drawing board

Being an engineer, let's be honest:  I'm cheap.  So, in waiting for prices to come down to pre-flooding prices, my home was unfortunately broken into.  Yeah, that sucked.  Fortunately for me, it was a smash and grab and whoever did it made off with my Xbox  and then a bunch of stuff out of my master bedroom.  My computers (which were in the basement) were left behind.

But the experience reaffirmed in my mind the need to get my NAS up and running as a back up for all our family memories that I have saved as pictures and video, my important documents, and the like.  But even just having a NAS wasn't enough for me.

After the break in, my mind has been playing all sorts of worst case scenarios of what could possibly happen to my data.  And I've finally come up with a plan:

First, I'm aggressively liquidating all my extra hardware and computers to raise some capital.

Then I'm ordering a low power pico x86 computer, with an extra hard drive bracket.

I've got some 2 GB laptop ram from when I removed it and put 4 GB in my netbook (which also wasn't miraculously stolen).  Then I'll order two 2.5" 2TB hard drives and a 4GB usb flash drive for the Freenas OS.  All that will constitute my low power 2TB software raid NAS.  Why not more power?  Or use the stuff I already have?

So I can put it in this:  Cannon H8 Safe with AC Power outlet, ethernet, and USB.

It has to be low power so not to burn itself up with it's own heat inside the safe.  So far between the processor and the two hard drives, max TDP (Total Dissipated Power) comes to around 14W max.  I imagine most of the time it won't be that high.  Cannon sells a safe dehumidifier that runs 8 watts.  I figure my NAS could run as a safe dehumidifier too.

Then, once I get my SSD and install windows, I'll put my windows 7 User Accounts on the NAS* which will be in the safe.  (If the information in that link works for mapped network drives...still have to determine that.)  So that way if my computer ever disappears, I'm only missing the hardware and installed software.  None of my personal information goes with it.  If my house ever burns down...I'll still have my data.  

Now to come up with $1350.  Which sounds like a lot.  The safe ($750) will last a lifetime.  As for the $600  NAS, it seems like a lot.  But if it works for 10 years, then hey, that's only $5 a month.  I don't know of any safe deposit boxes the size of this safe for that price, and you would still have to go and get your backup drive from it on a regular basis.  (And I've yet to find safe deposit boxes with an internet connection...and I'm sure if I did, it would be much more than $5 a month).  And I can't put my extra car keys and passport on the cloud, nor find 2TB of storage that cheap (and I don't want my data there anyway).  This is the best of both worlds.

*Update:  I've since posted to the tutorial in the SevenForums asking if it's possible to move these folders to a mapped network drive.  The author of the tutorial discourages it.  However, I may move what I can out of my user folder to the NAS through libraries and the programs that store stuff in the Users folder.  We shall see.