Build Your Own Cloud !

Build Your Own Cloud!

Hard Drives Get a Second Life

Getting the convenience of the cloud with the value of external hard drives

By Joanna Stern
March 3, 2015

My life has become a series of low-storage warnings.

My laptop scolds me that it’s out of free space; my smartphone refuses to let me take another photo. It’s 2015, and where are all the darn terabytes I was promised?

Right at a time when we’re amassing more photos, videos and other files than ever before, we’ve gone from having computers with beefy internal hard drives to ultrathin laptops and phones with puny amounts of flash storage. Our consolation prize? Terabytes of subscription storage found on tech companies’ invisible servers in the cloud.

But can you blame me for not entrusting my entire digital life—from wedding photos to tax documents—to Google,Apple or Microsoft ’s servers? Trust aside, their monthly fees add up, and uploading big files on my poky home Internet connection can take hours.

So instead, I have been keeping my precious files on an old external USB hard drive that I shuttle between my desk drawer and bag. But that’s the digital equivalent of stashing money in a mattress. If something were to happen to it, I’d lose everything. And unless the drive is plugged into my computer, I can’t access my files, which is always a problem since, as my mom says, I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached.

Seagate’s Personal Cloud systems and Western Digital’s My Cloud systems. Photo: Drew Evans/The Wall Street Journal 

 

Seagate’s Personal Cloud systems and Western Digital’s My Cloud systems.

I’ve finally decided to take some responsibility for my sad storage situation: I built my own cloud. Nope, I haven’t outfitted a hot-air balloon with a bunch of servers or anything. Rather, I set up Western Digital ’s My Cloud website and Seagate ’s brand new Personal Cloud—a pair of giant hard drives that live in your home but are accessible from anywhere. You open and save files through apps, just as you would through a cloud storage service, like Google Drive or Dropbox.

They blend the convenience of cloud storage with the speed, space and affordability of an external hard drive. Both start at just $170 for a whopping three terabytes of space. That’s nearly 24 times the amount of storage in my laptop! By comparison, it costs about $120 a year to get just one terabyte on Google Drive. (If you just want to back up your files, there are much cheaper cloud options.)

Network-attached storage drives—which real nerds call NAS—certainly aren’t new. But the big advantage of these two user-friendly solutions is that you no longer have to be a real nerd to reap their benefits.

Easy Setup and Access

Both boxes are extremely easy to set up. Power them on, plug them into one of your Wi-Fi router’s Ethernet ports, hit their setup guide websites, follow a few instructions and then, just like that, your drive is wirelessly accessible from your laptop, phone or tablet. Using the companies’ apps, there’s no reason you couldn’t access it while on the other side of the world; you just need a good Internet connection.

Seagate’s Android app is more stable than its iOS app.

Western Digital’s iOS app is easier to navigate than Seagate’s.

From a coffee shop, I could browse photos, videos and files stored in my apartment 5 miles away. I was also able to save a document remotely. With multiple user accounts, anyone in the family can have the same access. And if you don’t want the young’uns to have access to your private folders, you can define what’s shared and what isn’t.

Whether on Mac or PC, Seagate lets you access the drive on your home network right through the operating system’s file managers. WD, on the other hand, requires a special program. When you aren’t on your home network, you have to be logged into the company’s apps with a username and password.

On both the Seagate and WD, all activity is encrypted, but having that much stored on your wireless network means it’s more important than ever to make sure your wireless router is password protected, with WPA2 encryption enabled.

Overall WD’s My Cloud apps were faster, cleaner and more stable. But the Seagate Media apps have more features, like instantly backing up my phone’s photos as soon as I’m on my home Wi-Fi. (I found the Seagate Media app for Android to be ahead of the cluttered and crashy iPhone app. Seagate says they are looking into the issues I experienced and plan to continue to improve the app.) 

Safe and Speedy

It’s bananas how cheap storage is now. But I actually recommend you spend a little more on your personal cloud drive. Both Seagate and WD have “two-bay” models, which house a second hard drive that out-of-the-box keeps a perfect copy of the first drive. If one drive crashes, you don’t lose a thing. Both Seagate and WD are using hard drives meant to spin all day long without incident, but you should always anticipate drive failures.

Seagate’s Personal Cloud 2-Bay has two hard drives, the second one keeps a perfect copy of the first.

Seagate’s Personal Cloud 2-Bay starts at $270 for a 4TB version (meaning 2TB of usable space); WD’s My Cloud Mirror starts at $300.. 

When you’re in your home network, both drives work with computer backup software such as Apple’s Time Machine. However, neither of these drives is impervious to fire or theft. And that’s why you may want to consider backing up your drive (or just specific important files) to a cloud service, too. WD’s My Cloud app integrates Dropbox, Google Drive and others. We actually recommend these more affordable cloud backup services.

Speed is another benefit of a home storage drive—they’re far quicker than the cloud. It took me just 25 seconds to transfer a 1GB file from my laptop to the Seagate Personal Cloud over my home wireless network. (Part of that was sped up by the fact that I have a new, faster router.) That same file took me an hour and 12 minutes to upload to Google Drive.

Of course, when you aren’t at home, connecting to your drive will be much slower. On Starbucks’s slow, crowded Wi-Fi it took three minutes just to load the beginning of a two-minute video.

Multimedia Extras

Seagate’s Roku app allows you to stream videos, photos and music stored on your drive. 

Both of these drives also play a unique role in the home, setting themselves apart from regular hard drives and cloud storage services by becoming your home’s multimedia jukebox.

The iPhone and iPad apps for Seagate and WD work with Apple TV. Using AirPlay, I was able to send videos stored on my drive to the TV in my bedroom, a few rooms away. Streaming was smooth for the most part, with occasional buffering.

But Seagate has the edge over WD with streaming capabilities. If you have a Roku media streamer or a smart TV from LG or Samsung , you can get a Seagate app that lists your drive’s videos and photos right on the TV screen. Using Roku’s remote, I selected my wedding video and watched it stream flawlessly in 1080p on my living room’s HDTV.

Seagate says you can plug your GoPro or other camera into its Personal Cloud’s USB 3.0 port to dump all of your photos and videos. When I tried it, I had no luck with the GoPro Hero4 and a Canon EOS Rebel T2i. The company says a camera must be capable of “mass storage” mode to work.

WD doesn’t promise that sort of easy-access camera functionality, but with both boxes I was able to plug in another external hard drive or USB drive and access that remotely as well.

I’ve ultimately decided I’d like Seagate’s Personal Cloud 2-Bay in my home. I prefer it for the photo backup and multimedia benefits. I would recommend, though, that people who aren’t interested in those perks should choose WD’s more stable My Cloud Mirror.

With a tiny server in my living room, I’ve finally shut up those low-storage warnings—at least until I fill it up with 4K llama videos.

Write to Joanna Stern at joanna.stern@wsj.com 

and on Twitter at @joannastern.

 

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http://superuser.com/questions/447970/sync-different-folders-with-owncloud?rq=1

Being a techie I've set this sort of thing up in various ways over the years. Only thing to watch for is that most of these boxes are Linux based. If you're an Outlook user you'll find the compatibility not so good

 

I'm leaning toward Seagate's system if I decide to move on from mainly Time Machine/Time Capsule backup.  (I also have the same WD portable hard drive Joanna is using in the video, but have found it less reliable than the Time Capsule.)  We have a Roku and an Apple TV, so being able to use the NAS as a media server would be ideal.My earlier experiences with Network Attached Storage, as recently as two years ago, were disappointing.  The software was very clunky, the interface ugly (dumping a multitude of folders on your desktop) and the speed for getting things out of the cloud glacial beyond network limitations.  Those that promised to serve multimedia largely failed to.My Time Capsule, though aging, is chugging along just fine.  But, when I'm ready to move on I will try a NAS again.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/build-your-own-cloud-hard-drives-get-a-second-life-1425406658