From recent conversation I know that there are a few Apple savvy people on here. I'm looking to add a wireless drive for backup and access of my Mac Air and if possible other mobile devices too. Would I be right in buying an Apple AirPort Time Capsule to back my Mac's OS and use it to also store some of our media files for access on our mobiles too?
Not really had much time messing about with macs (got Col's 27" iMac here to play with now tho! ) I have got soft fruit ipad and iPhone devices but from what I know Apple time machine is the name of the backup software bundled with mac osx. You don't have to buy the apple airport in order to use time machine, a lot of pretty cheap NAS media servers are time machine comparable which can handle file storage for all devices as well as OS X backup duties. Why do you want to use wifi for the drive connection?
Cheers Craig. I don't so much need their WiFi connection, but need a network drive that the Mac Air can access as a drive letter so it works like an internal one for storing files on, then our mobiles can access family photos, movies etc. Backing the Mac up would be a bonus.
I have a zyxel nas media drive unit which works pretty well for all things desktop related and pretty cheap too (more expensive units like qnap and synology are meant to be pretty good but never used personally!), tablets and phones are a bit more tricky as they don't have the tools n utilities implemented in there OS to handle direct file mapping. The device has an Ethernet connection to allow it to connect up to your network for other devices to see and interact with it no matter how they connect either by wifi or Ethernet. Most of the nas or personal cloud storage drives have apps and options available in the iOS and android stores to allow photo and video backup off phones and tablets. Look into 'polkast' and 'own cloud' as the device can operate as a server for both to pretty decent effect. Polkast can often work happily behind the router firewall without requiring you to open up specific ports to allow connection, this keeps your network as locked down and secure as it can be while still allowing cloud access on say your phone while out and about via its 3G connection. The media drive I have has two drive bays which allow two hard drives to be raid striped which allows for drive redundancy should a drive fail, the use of two drives with the same data on both also allows for a little faster file access as it can retrieve data from either drive and both at same for different files. Here's a link to the zyxel site. http://www.zyxel.com/uk/en/products_services/home-network_storage_and_players.shtml?t=c
You've certainly done your homework there Had a look at the Zyxel site and there are a flurry of different NAS drives and media servers. Looking at what's available I think I just need a NAS drive as the Mac will play the media. Cloud wise, there appear to be a number of ways of sharing files across the devices.
The first thing you need to think about is..........what do you want the for??? Is it just to stream music and videos to phones/tablets and have it accessable on the Mac or something more? If it's just to stream stuff over then the Mac could just share a folder on its hard drive to allow network access, no need to buy anything. The cloud part can get a little fuzzy and confusing when using the term cloud to identify both the main cloud out on the internet which is someone else's computers storing your data and you having to download copies over the Internet every time you wish to view or access something. The own cloud or personal cloud really means you store all your own data on your own computers in this case a small network attached storage device(NAS device), so when you attempt to access a file from your own personal cloud your just accessing a computer on your own home network and will not require Internet access at all while your connected to your own home network.
