While I haven’t finished sorting through all the old external hard drives, I have cleared enough to setup the home cloud to run as planned. After a bit of a rough start, we’ve been up and running for the past few weeks. So far, the results are mixed.

In the pro column, it’s very nice to not have to plug the external hard drive into my laptop every time I want access to one my files, or to download my photos off of my memory card. I’m no longer relegated to doing work from a single spot in the house. It’s like I suddenly have a much larger hard drive on my laptop. Everything is always at my fingertips. I didn’t realize just how inconvenient my old setup was until the cloud was up and running.

The backup also runs more smoothly from the cloud than it ever did from my laptop. I’d often leave the external hard drive unplugged for days on end. Obviously if the drive is disconnected it cannot be backed up. Our cloud computer is always on, so there are no interruptions.

As predicted, however, using the old hardware is s…l…o…w… It’s probably also partially the wireless in the apartment, as the signal isn’t great in the office were our home cloud is running. How slow is it? A weekend set of photos would take about 10 to 20 minutes with the old setup of plugging the hard drive in directly to my laptop. The new setup, with the “new” hard drive takes seven hours. Not exactly ideal.

I think I may have to break down and buy a new computer/new external drives after all. I’m going to try and limp along, at least until after the holidays and Ziggy’s arrival. I’d prefer not to get anything new until after the move, especially since I’m not sure what the where exactly is the bottle neck. For now, I’ll try and make do.

Posted in Internet & Technology | Tags: Home Automation