Data points...

[alexpgp]

Between the questionable security offered by companies that provide online "cloud" storage^[1] and the fact that you're renting disk real estate and not buying it, there's been interest in creating personal clouds, especially since massive amounts of storage can be had for very reasonable prices. I've been experimenting with something called ownCloud the past couple of weeks, running it on a Raspberry Pi with attched USB storage. The jury is still out on my experience, which has not been without bumps, mostly having to do with configuration issues (duh!) and particularly with treating SQLite like a black box. But I digress...

I have been made aware of two products that address the "personal cloud" market. They are "WD My Cloud" personal cloud storage from Western Digital, and "CloudBox" from LaCie. Given that—ceteris paribus—storage is storage, the winners and losers in this market will be determined by how good the accompanying software is, both in terms of functionality and security.

I have been putting off some work for the past couple of days, so it's time to buckle down and get it done today. I also have a bunch of maintenance stuff to do and some more junk to get rid of.

Cheers...

[1] If memory serves, several years ago, after having assured customers of the security of its storage, Dropbox was forced to admit that such security was based on a company policy against employees browsing through customer files, as opposed to, say, encrypted storage.

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I picked up WD's My Book Live on sale from Amazon a month or so ago and it's been running fine via the wireless network without any thought on my part. It's plugged into my router. It does take quite awhile to initially get everything copied over, but it did it in the background, so from my point of view it's been invisible.

[platofish.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I pretty much abandoned ownCloud in favor of Dropbox. I still have a couple of instances of ownCloud running, but rarely use them. Like you say, its all down to software - Dropbox just works, and has yet to let me down. Even so, I still run semi-manual backups using chronosync onto a couple of large discs (one at one, one at home).

[velvet-granat.livejournal.com]

if you are concerned about Dropbox (which does use encryption for transfers), there is always Boxcryptor - https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/dropbox

We use a WD MyBookLive over the home WiFi network, it's pretty good. Personal/business backup goes to the private partition a couple of times a week, the rest of the media sits in public, and the entire lot gets backed up onto another drive once a month (also WD, but just a USB drive plugged into the router). I don't use it as cloud storage, though, it's behind firewalls. Considering the NDAs I've got with my clients, it's seems counter-intuitive to shove it all into the great big world, encryption or not...

I suppose, if I really needed a personal Cloud, I could buy another unit and treat it as an unsecured drive. But I'm not that needy when we travel. An old-school book suffices :)

As for software, it works nicely with the standard Windows backup, and a lot more reliable than a previous server used to be. Don't know about the WD backup software, haven't tried it. It streams music and movies well enough, so that freed up the laptop space and made it so much easier to keep all our music organised! I tried getting the WD "safepoint" software to work, but it's finicky and capricious, and it turned out that GoodSync is perfectly capable of doing the same job in quarter of the time.