News - Kickstarter 'Plug' transforms USB drives into personal Dropbox

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Combined software and hardware solution improves on "expensive and slow" cloud.

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Read more.

I can't play the video at work so I'm not sure, but isn't this just a way to turn your USB storage into a NAS drive?

I also can't watch video however it does look like a way of making USB storage accessible via VPN with minimal setup.

This looks perfect!

Interesting concept, although I'm not sure I entirely get how it works yet! Only USB2 though, which seems a shame... Maye I'll wait and see what v2 looks like.

I think I must be missing something crucial here - surely something like a RPi+USB crates plus ownCloud would already do this?

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Originally Posted by crossy

I think I must be missing something crucial here - surely something like a RPi+USB crates plus ownCloud would already do this?

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There are ways to do this for me. What I want is a way to do this that is as close to plug and play as possible for various family members to use. This fits the bill.

This is pretty much what I do, but it's far from user friendly to the non-geeks around and I'd say that there's call for something that works with minimal intervention for the Apple market target.

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Originally Posted by Spreadie

, but isn't this just a way to turn your USB storage into a NAS drive?

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Looks like that to me too.....

Available now:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pogoplug-File-Media-Sharing-Device/dp/B003FZB6C8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373541627&sr=8-1&keywords=pogoplug

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Originally Posted by gagaga

Available now:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pogoplug-Fil...words=pogoplug

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...except Pogoplug doesn't allow you to connect up devices at 2 sites, connected by VPN and automatically synch data between them for free as far as I'm aware: it backs your data up to Amazon S3, for which there's a charge.

As has been mentioned, you could set something like this up with 2 or 3 Raspberry Pis, some USB disk and Owncloud if you had the nous. Most of my family have decent broadband connections, and I'm quite happy to use them (in a reciprocal fashion, of course) as a free offsite backup location as part of my backup regime. It also means that I can be reasonably happy that I'm not going to have to try to recover data from my old man's PC too, as I can keep an eye on *their* backups at the same time as mine.

I wonder what performance will be like with this? A lot of these type of devices end up with fairly old SOCs and can barely manage a few MB/s over LAN.

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Under the hood, the average transfer speed for your data will be around 30Mb/s.

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Unless that lower case b is a typo, that's not what I'd call quick if you're hoping to use it for any significant amount of data over LAN.

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Originally Posted by watercooled

I wonder what performance will be like with this? A lot of these type of devices end up with fairly old SOCs and can barely manage a few MB/s over LAN.

Edit: Unless that lower case b is a typo, that's not what I'd call quick if you're hoping to use it for any significant amount of data over LAN.

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You're going to be limited by the USB2.0 interface, which is pretty shocking for network attached storage.

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Originally Posted by Spreadie

You're going to be limited by the USB2.0 interface, which is pretty shocking for network attached storage.

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Again, this isn't about creating a cheap NAS (there are cheaper and faster ways to do that with an RPi): it's a file synch/backup tool which just happens to make use of NAS capability.

So Plug doesn't cost extra for storage, you just have to have a ton of externals? I feel like you'd need an operator's switchboard to make it work. Backupthat does something similar, but since it uses your email, it doesn't cost you hundreds of dollars for the external devices, and no switchboarding is required.

So long as I'm understanding their blurb the idea is that you buy 2 (or more) of the devices. Connect a USB disk to each and store them at 2 different locations.

Your house gets burgled? Your data is still safe. Backups that you keep at the same location as your data are less solid than backups that are kept offsite (potentially involving some form of rotation).

Also in terms of having loads of external devices: how much data do you need to backup, and how much is that data worth to you if you lost it? I'd hazard that once you figure out the answer to those then you'll be able to store all of your important data on... perhaps a single 4Tb USB disk?