Posts tagged as:

storage

Digital Home Storage : Using a NAS (intro)

by Geekboy on 1 January, 2009

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!!

As part of my new goals for 2009, I’m going to post more regularly and share more of my living tech experiences and tips for others to benefit. It also serves as a record of what I have found, crawling through the net.

g3435So the first series of articles I’m working on is, having a digital home storage system.

Why?

Because, more of our lives are going digital..

How many of you DON’T convert your new CDs to mp3?

How many of you DIDN’T take the Christmas/New Year/Wedding/Birthday pictures using a digital camera?

How many of you DON’T use a computer? (and if you don’t, I’m quite interested in knowing how you are reading this post :P )

But how are we storing all these pictures/videos/documents?

Keep buying hard disks? burning to CD/DVD-ROMs?

They work.. and there are many ways of doing this.. but I’m have been thinking for some time about this… getting the most value for money but yet and more importantly, protecting my digital memories.

I want a simple system to meet all these requirements.

  1. Big storage
  2. Backed up (mirrored storage -> with Raid 1 at least)
  3. easy and fast access to all the files
  4. reduce the need of multiple files on different computers
  5. lower power usage – so can be left on 24/7
  6. Can even be accessed thru the internet
  7. can be used as a server for my media (mp3/video) files.
  8. share photos easily with user and group access restrictions (big bonus)
  9. my whole family can use (my non-tech parents and sister)

rainbowphotoboxSo after careful researching, I decided on getting a NAS. A Network Attached Storage, basically a machine that houses harddisk(s) and you connect it through your network router/switch.

The next post, I’ll share with you the different NAS systems I have looked at.

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Simple document storage/veiwing system for iPod Touch/iPhone

by mossad30 on 17 December, 2008

I had recently upgraded my iPod Touch OS to the 2.2 version so as to be able to use the new App Store function. Had to pay AU$12.99 (got an iTunes gift card worth AU$20 for only AU$16!) for the upgrade because my iPod is a Gen 1 version. My iPod Touch is no longer jailbroken and I did find some problems with the installer.app (will do another post regarding this).

I had noticed previously that using Gmail on the native Mail application allowed me to store documents. On the other hand, trying to store documents on my iPod Touch was really a pain in the ass. What I have done to make use of the Mail program, sign up for a Gmail account and then send those documents that I need to this account. Once downloaded, they will be saved as attachments within the email. To me its a simple and free way to store your documents without jumping through hoops!

Attachment types supported by the Mail program

.doc: Microsoft Word
.docx: Microsoft Word (XML)
.htm: webpage
.html: webpage
.key: Keynote
.numbers: Numbers
.pages: Pages
.pdf: Preview, Adobe Acrobat
.ppt: Microsoft PowerPoint
.pptx: Microsoft PowerPoint (XML)
.txt: text
.vcf: contact information
.xls: Microsoft Excel
.xlsx: Microsoft Excel (XML)

UPDATE: I just found a free (lite) software “Files lite” from the App Store that allows pretty much the same function I mentioned above by using WiFi to connect to a PC and transferring them to the iPod, up to a max of 200MB for the “lite” version. The difference I guess is that my method is more simple and the files reside on the internet with up to 8GB of storage or the amount of space available on your iPod, while the software connects to a PC and storage is limited for this version.

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