Much can be said about the Cloud, the new catchy word for Internet. It’s all encompassing and many things in our lives depend on it today.
One of those things is personal data like pictures, movies and songs that have been growing in leaps and bounds. Gone is the shoebox full of pictures or the dozen or so family videotapes and stacks of vinyl records.
Sure, it’s easy to store a few gigabytes online but what if I told you you could have your own secure Internet accessible Cloud, right under your home computer desk.
Today it’s easy to accumulate thousands of songs, digital photos from phones and cameras and countless hours of digital videos. Where can all this priceless media be safely stored?
Sure, your casual phone photos can be shared and saved on Facebook or as email attachments but it seems the Internet or Cloud is the most convenient, handy and safe place to store the growing number of files we accumulate. Industry watchers agree, you are more likely to lose a digital photo between your phones, tablets and PCs than an old fashioned photo shoebox.
But there’s more to online storage than the allure of having your personal and private Cloud storage, available from anywhere and any device. It’s deciding how much space you will need now and in the future. Pictures and songs can be small, while better quality sizes can take up much more room.
Photo enthusiasts can easily shoot and video more than 30 Gigabytes in several trips. This translates to vast amounts of data you don’t want to part with yet, like me. Don’t be surprised when the digital storage conversation changes to Terabytes (1000 Gigabytes) and now you have a problem of the typical garage full of valuable stuff!
Enter online storage where your stuff is safe, out of harm’s way and accessible from anywhere via Internet. This has started a big business: online storage.
The most common online storage providers like iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox offer from two to 16 free Gigabytes of storage. This includes incentives like referrals and new devices you buy with more space.
On that note, Dropbox “free” storage upgrades are becoming common. The new Samsung Galaxy S Tabs include 50 free Gigabytes in Dropbox. If you read the fine print, it’s only for two years. After that you will have to pay to keep that presumably filled storage at a current rate of $10.99 CDN per month for a minimum of 100 Gigabytes.
Note to self: Buy Dropbox shares before the popular company starts collecting for expired free storage…
What is one to do? Get your own Cloud storage.
The ioSafe NAS 214 is a viable and easy alternative to being a slave to expensive, small, slow and to many, storage open to global hackers and the whelm of its providers. It’s best suited for folks who need affordable, safe, flexible and fast storage of one Terabyte or more.
The 214 is a fireproof and waterproof hard drive instantly duplicating its files to an included, second, same-size hard drive (that is called a RAID 1 system in geek-speak). It can sit under your desk and is connected via an Ethernet cable to your modem. You, your family or small company can copy files to it and back up data. If one hard drive fails, you can replace it and it magically fills up from the working drive. ioSafe provides a free, limited volume, first-time data recovery service in case the 214 drives ever get corrupted.
It gets better. You can access the 214 from wherever you are on the Internet and upload new files, like pictures during your travels, or download previously stored data. You have your own password, can share files with others, even email picture attachments using a mobile device from anywhere. It will automatically back up a USB or SD drive just by sticking it in.
When away, you can stream your stored music to your mobile Windows or Mac laptop, iOS and Android devices. The Synology DSM software and hardware in the 214 make it easy for beginners to use (with an excellent help service) for basic backup and sharing. But it’s far more capable in higher pro-business environments.
Let’s look at the cost and how you can justify it if you have a lot more to store than the big name companies offer.
The ioSafe 214 NAS starts at $899.99 US with a one-Terabyte drive capacity (two one-Terabyte drives acting as one.) It is also available without hard drives for less, with recommended drive models. Larger configurations are available on: https://iosafe.com
In home or office network environments, the 214 uploads data ten times faster than a typical consumer online site. A 100 megabyte folder of 13 pictures took me 16 seconds to upload on the ioSafe 214 compared to the 240 seconds on Microsoft’s Onedrive. Same goes for downloads, and I have a faster connection than most.
This means, it would take between one to two months for the average user to upload one terabyte of data on the big name storage company sites above, compared to the ioSafe 214 which would do it in just under two days.
Oh yes, there’s the cost of having one terabyte of storage online…from $1,000 to $1,500 per year not to mention your home Internet bill for the data transfers.
Imagine…having your own secure cloud away from the rest, in a nice package, the size of two small shoe boxes that can withstand fire at 1550°F for 30 minutes or be fully submersed ten feet in fresh or salt water for 72 hours. Your home PC that access the 214 does not have to be on when away. All you need is for your 214 to be turned on and hooked up to you modem.
As sophisticated the ioSafe 214 is, it also offers the best and most trusted security procedure of your backed up files if things get crazy out there…just pull its power plug off the wall and no-one can get to it!
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