Simple personal cloud storage arrives, without drawback of monthly charges
Not so long ago the phrase, “simple personal cloud storage” was an oxymoron. Setup and use wasn’t always simple, and prices were more premium than personal.
Personal cloud storage (often referred to as Network Attached Storage or NAS), describes a box with one or more hard or solid-state drives that connects to your home/office network via Ethernet.
If you’re familiar with Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive or other such cloud-based storage services, a personal cloud storage device provides many of the same features, but with a delightful difference: there are no monthly charges.
For those with security concerns, there is a second delightful difference — your data isn’t sitting on someone else’s server in some remote location. Instead, your data is stored on a device on your home or office network and accessed via local wired or WiFi network, or over the Internet.
And now, a confession: While I still consider myself a geek, as I get older I find I have less patience and less time to spend tweaking technology. In the past I’d spend days (or weeks) tweaking a new app or hardware device so it worked just the way I wanted it to work.
I still enjoy a bit of tweaking, but the older I get, the more I prefer things that “just work.” Also, I’m cheap and most network-attached storage products were too expensive for my needs.
That all changed with My Cloud Home, a new personal storage device that’s reasonably priced, easy to configure and use, and surprisingly fullfeatured.
I’ve been testing a 4TB My Cloud Home that costs $199 and so far, I’m quite impressed. There are macOS and iOS apps that make it easy to view and work with your data from anywhere in the world using your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, plus a web interface that makes your files available to you via any device with a modern web browser.
But wait. There’s much more. In addition to allowing you to view and copy files to and from the device from anywhere in the world, using almost any computer or mobile device, it includes totally useful options:
• Automatically back up photos and videos from your phone over Wi-Fi and/or cellular.
• Backup files from Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, and/or Facebook.
• Support for Plex media server, so you can stream photos, music, and/or video from My Cloud Home to almost any network-enabled device (additional charges for Plex may apply).
• Support for IFTTT, so you can set up applets to save new Gmail attachments, tagged Facebook photos, new Instrgram photos and videos, and more.
Finally, everything I’ve tested — enabling Dropbox, Google Drive, and Facebook backups and the Plex media server; and setting up IFTTT — has been drop-dead simple.