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Building My Own Personal Cloud with PogoPlug
Yesterday I received the PogoPlug I ordered and got it installed. I’ve been intrigued by this little device since we ran across it at CES2009 and after some early usage I can say that it works as advertised and is a breeze to set up. Essentially you follow the instructions on the PogoPlug website and within a few minutes you are up and running. It sure makes you wish everything one attached to a network or a computer was this easy to set up.
The way the PogoPlug system works has been well chronicled but here’s a quick recap. Essentially you plug the included LAN Cable into your router and the PogoPlug. Then you plug in it into either a wall socket or a power strip. . The PogoPlug folks include an AC cord in case you need to plug this into a powerstrip. After that you plug in the USB drive you want to use. I’m using a Western Digital MyBook (750GB) that you can pick up pretty cheap these days, and of course there are many other solutions. If you want to use a USB thumb drive you can plug that in as well. Once you’re plugged in you go to the website enter your email address and set up a password and you’re off and running.
You can access your files via a browser or choose to install software that allows you to mount whatever you’ve got attached to your computer as another drive. You can do this on either a PC or a Mac, and there is an iPhone app that allows you to access the PogoPlug as well. You can choose to share data on your network if that is your druthers.
In my situation I’m building my own little personal cloud with the PogoPlug. I’ve moved some music and video files, along with some documents that I don’t access that often to the MyBook. Many of these files are work files I use for my theatre work (sound cues, music cues, artwork, etc ). Rather than having them tied to my desk at work, I’ve now got them plugged in at home awaiting the next time I need them. I could also choose to upload photos from my iPhone if I wanted to. You can play music and video over this network, assuming that you aren’t trying to play DRM protected files, or in the case of videos you have the file ripped into an iPhone(iPod) compatible format. One of these days all of that will be transportable but alas, not yet. In any event the streaming seems pretty quick over WiFi and more than serviceable over 3G.
I’ve got several different cloud solutions for things that I use more frequently (Flickr for photos, EverNote for notes and web clippings, Live Mesh for files I’m working on, etc ) but I’m looking at this as a holding zone for those files I don’t need to access but may need to have handy every now and again.
So far I like what I see.
Charles Jannace
05/06/2009 at 4:35 pm
Very interesting. Before I go to their website and get some details, do you think that this could be a replacement for a subscription to GoToMyPc or LogMeIn?
Warner Crocker
05/06/2009 at 5:33 pm
Charles,
I don’t see this as a replacement for the other things those services do. This is more like having a file server on the next work that you can access files from. The key here is that you are not logged onto a computer back at home or at the office but merely accessing a drive that is attached to the PogoPlug.
Solomon
05/06/2009 at 6:01 pm
what about plugging my Lacie NAS into it, and sending it off to my brother in Canada, to plug into his router, to get me some real time off site backup?
Warner Crocker
05/06/2009 at 6:10 pm
Solomon,
If you mean sending off the PogoPlug and the USB with your files on it and then being able to access it, that could be done.
Jim
05/07/2009 at 4:38 am
Any way to use this like live mesh? I have loved live mesh and having all my word processing and a few other type files available on all computers at all times. No such thing on this though, huh? Maybe they will develop some sync software that would make it work? Not sure if it is worth it only for what you said was files that fall into that “occasional need from anywhere” category. But would love to have my own live mesh on my own drive.
Sumocat
05/07/2009 at 10:44 am
So does this thing stream video or just let you download it to your device? I keep searching for info on that, but official data from PogoPlug has been very ambiguous.
Warner Crocker
05/07/2009 at 12:38 pm
Sumocat,
If the video is encoded in the iphone/ipod format it does stream successfully.
Jim,
There’s no automatic sync going on here like with Live Mesh. If you mount he drive and use data that way I guess you could call this a mesh of sorts, but it really is just storing and manually changing data on the drive.