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You might consider an anti-static packet for the thumb drives. I’ve had too many thumb drives fail – that solution makes me nervous. You might consider a small portable hard drive as an additional option. As long as you properly dismount them before packing, they’re actually very resilient. Don’t trust TSA – they mess with mail too

Hope you’re using a camera that produces raw files… Good luck with the wedding!

I would have loved to read about this here instead of discovering the various pieces on my own. Maybe others will be interested…

Like many families today, we’re reasonably connected. We typically watch shows that we record or download, and rarely live TV. We also have a collection of family videos, and have ripped all of our CDs to mp3s. Like many people, we have several rooms in our house where we’d like to have access to all this media. And of course it would be nice to have it in a secure place where a failed hard drive doesn’t result in disaster.

The solution for us has been a Synology DS214play NAS, along with Plex server. The Plex server runs right on the NAS. You copy your music to the Music folder, your movies to the Movies folder, and your TV shows to the TV Shows folder. Plex takes over from there. It indexes and categorizes ALL of your media, and does a particularly good job with TV Shows, Music, and Movies. It organizes your tunes and makes them easily searchable, and organizes your TV shows by season and episode, complete with pictures from the show and a plot description for each episode. You can access all your media from practically any device, both locally and over the internet. We have Samsung smart tvs which have their own Plex client that works great. Plex also supports DLNA, so my network-enabled receiver has full access to my music collection. All your media – stored on one redundant device – accessible from anywhere…

Doesn’t take a computer genius to operate, either. The NAS has a web interface and is pretty easy to navigate. Supports connections to both Macs and Windows PCs. Does all the typical things a NAS does, enabling file storage, sharing, backups, etc. But the free Plex server makes it a must-have box for the connected home.

Well any more than this and you’d either think I work for the company, or was writing the article. Neither. Happy to provide more details if you’re interested.

If you’re a dedicated photographer, you most likely have a ‘real’ camera and have raw files to deal with rather than tiny jpegs. In addition, if you’re going somewhere really decent, connectivity is sketchy at best. Common data protection practices actually work, but as you alluded, require prior planning.

I loaded up my Lenovo tablet with as much storage as it will hold, and also carry both spare memory cards and a small, portable, 2T USB3 drive. My nightly ritual includes copying the days shots and GPS logs to the tablet, and then to the hard drive. This gives me three copies of every shot. While traveling, hard drive goes in my wife’s carry-on, memory cards in my checked suitcase, and tablet in my carry-on.

Unless the plane crashes, we should be in good shape. And I don’t spend hours trying to back up hundreds of 25mb raw files over WiFi…

Lincoln: I am disappointed that you dropped OneDrive from your analysis. I have no use for versioning, or rather I manage my own versioning system, and absolutely do not want or need my OneDrive backup system to retain versions. OD provides a remarkably cheap (with 1 TB coming “free” with an Office 365 sub) and effective back up option. I sync my data partition to a OneDrive partition on my computer twice each week (on other days I backup key folders to Briefcase). This seems a fine option to me, since I am working in Central Asia and do not have the luxury of highspeed broadband. I hope you can think through the range of options that OneDrive (and other cloud backup programs) offer and cover them in a future article.

By the way, the reason I don’t want versioning in the cloud is that I maintain my own versions, by moving backup files to a folder in a different partition on my hard drive. So I end up with an almost complete history of a file, with up to around 50 versions. Some time after completion of the job, I delete the folder.

I’m disappointed that you dropped OneDrive too. Now with unlimited free space with O365, you can’t beat it. Versioning is not important to me either. Much of what I do is with Photoshop Lightroom, which keeps changes in a database rather than updating each image file. It automatically does database backups, and versions those backups. While the granularity isn’t perfect, it’s more than adequate for me. The vast majority of my other documents rarely change. And for those that do, I save a separate version consciously. I’ve found OneDrive to have the best uploading performance of those I’ve tried. I currently have about 700gb of data, and this is excellent off-site, inexpensive, easy to share cloud storage.

I’m also considering doing an image backup of my operating system partition and letting OneDrive sync the backup file.

And this is in addition to my local backups…

Here’s an approach that gives me two instant copies outside of my main computer and a cloud-based off-site backup. All for $40/year with unlimited backup space. It’s a combination of two solutions:

1. The first solution is simple – I use an external eSATA drive along with Memeo Backup Premium, which lets me choose source and destination folders. Memeo Backup automatically detects changes to files in the source folder and copies it to the destination folder. So I get a real-time external backup to a separate physical drive.

2. I also use PogoPlug. This is a cool little external device that you plug into your network, then plug a USB drive into it. Install their little software client and the USB drive shows up as a drive on your main computer. Any or all of your local computers can use this drive. You then sign up for PogoPlug’s UNLIMITED backup service, which is currently $40/year. Configure the PogoPlug backup service to backup your USB drive to the PogoPlug cloud. It first does a full backup of your USB drive, then constantly watches it and copies any changes to the cloud. Finally, create a new plan in Memeo to automatically backup your pictures, music, and video to the PogoPlug USB drive. The PogoPlug software then copies the files to the cloud automatically.

A few notes…

1. since the eSATA drive is local and a very fast connection, files get copied to it very quickly.

2. the USB drive is network-connected, so files get copied to it slower, but the software does not slow down your computer at all, and no user intervention is required.

3. the PogoPlug copy-to-cloud is extremely slow. It took a couple weeks to copy my 1T of pictures, music, and videos. But does it matter? My main computer was shut on and off during this time, only the tiny PogoPlug box was on. And in the mean time, I have TWO external copies of my data.

4. the PogoPlug web site lets you view and share your pictures and music with anyone. It even has a decent but not too fancy viewer/player built in.

Overall, minimal cost, three complete data copies, one off-site, together with easy sharing and remote access.

If anyone has a better system, I’d sure like to see it…

Hi Lincoln,

Followed your steps exactly, and it worked with no problems. But while I was poking around in the other advanced settings on my Netgear WNR2000, I found that you can just choose “Enable Access Point Mode” and it changes all of the settings for you, allowing you to either get a dynamic address from your main router or use a static address, which they don’t recommend. If you use a static address they force you to enter default gateway, DNS addresses, etc., which may be confusing for some.

Thanks for the great article…

Bob

Great Article!

I’ve used this kind of power-line technology for the past twenty years. Here are a couple pointers:

1. Linc mentioned his problem began around Christmas. I wonder if anyone got new musical instruments that plug in? I’ve had this problem many times – in an effort to keep powerline noise out of the instruments, the makers put filters in their power supplies which wipe out the signal – both on the instrument side and the power line side! Unplug the gadgets one at a time watching the signal strength lights and you’ll figure out which one is causing the problem. Plug the offending instrument into a surge-protecting power strip and you’ll be fine.

2. Most homes have 220v coming in from the street. This actually comes from a 220v center-tapped transformer on the pole. You have three wires coming in. One is a return, or ground which is the center tap. There is 220v across the other two, and 110v from either of these two to ground. Here’s the issue: half of the recepticles in your house are most likely fed by one of the wires coming in, the other half by the other wire. This means that if you have a HomePlug in a recepticle fed by one wire; and another HomePlug fed by the other wire – the signal must go all the way out to the transformer at the street and back again. So if one of your HomePlugs has a really poor signal, try it in another outlet and maybe then both will be on the same wire. For some powerline technologies like X-10 and Insteon you can actually purchase a “bridge” that echoes the signal between the two wires, but I haven’t seen anything like that for HomePlug.