I’m not one to push any products as a rule, but when something that I’ve come to love and rely on goes on sale, I kind of feel like I have to share it.
Some time back, I lost all my photos that were on a network drive that I was using as a backup and storage device. The one drive in that device, an IOMega 2T Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition, failed, taking with it all my photos. I leaned my lesson about backups only being backups if they were redundant, but I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on a high-volume solution. What I ultimately found was something called Pogoplug. Specifically, the Pogoplug Media Sharing Device, or POGO-02. This let me hook up four generic USB drives to my network and, through their free software, access those drives from anywhere with an internet connection. They even have clients for both iPhone and the whole range of Android devices, including my Nook HD+! (Which is great for my “other life” as a professional computer geek, because it gives me a way to load all kinds of PDF documentation to my Nook, but that’s a different post.)
Well, here’s the thing, starting tonight at 8:00PM, Adorama will have the Pogoplug Media Sharing Device, in black, on sale for $29.99! Granted, you still will need to add USB hard drives to this, but the device is super simple to setup and use. And, do yourself a favor, buy two drives of the same size and mirror them together. That way, if one drive fails you still have the other one with all your data on it. (This little baby has four USB slots, so you can hook up four drives, making two mirror pairs. Which is precisely what I did.)
The only other small downside to this is that it is NOT wireless. You’ll need to use a short ethernet cable, which they include, to hook it up to your wifi router directly. But, mostly that’s okay, because most people will want to go ahead and keep all this gear together with that wifi router anyway. And, again, that’s what I do.
So, if you’ve been looking for a cheap way to get some drives on your home network and share that or access it via the internet, this is a great product and I cannot recommend it enough! Act fact, because this is only good through the end of July 2013!
