I take a lot of photos of the kids and if I ever had to lose my wife would skin me alive. I don’t like the idea of uploading them somewhere on the Web and would much rather keep them at home. How do I keep them safe?

I’ve had this question thrown at me a couple of times. My initial answer usually centers around some sort of online storage like SkyDrive or so many of the others around; however this wasn’t an option in this case. One great option for keeping a copy of your photos at home is a removable hard disk, one of these USB drives that you can just plug into your computer and take a copy of your photos. But even USB disks can go bad, especially if you drop one, so what can you do.

Well, I came across a great gadget when browsing the sale pages on buy.com. It’s an external USB drive with a twist. The Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition WDH2U20000 Hard Drive Array comes with 2 x 1Terabyte disks which can be configured in a RAID 1 configuration. This means that the 2 disks mirror each other, creating a double copy of your data. In the event of a disk failure, the other disk contains a complete set of the data, so you still have access to your files.

The particular model is cool in that you can swap out the disks without even needing a screw driver. You can just pop the lid open, pull out the defective disk, replace with a new one and wait for it to replicate all your data across.

So, if you’re paranoid about your data and want to make sure you never use anything. Check out the WD My Book Mirror Edition. It might just give you the peace of mind you’re after.