Store Your Media on Network Hard Drive for Your Media Center

Your music, photo and video collection can easily grow so large that your device’s hard drive is not enough. You also might want to share the files between different rooms or computers in your apartment or house. In addition, you need to remember to take backups of your precious media files, e.g. your holiday pictures. So, you need to look for a solution to store your files to external network hard drive.

I use Synology 209+ network hard drive which is excellent as it has two hard drives which are mirroring the data so that if one hard drive crashes I still have all the files safe on the other hard drive. This is particularly important because you do not want to backup your precious photo collection to an external hard drive only to find out later that after crashing you have no backups at all.

Relating backups, you should not limit taking backups on one location only, but additional online backup service might be useful particularly for your photos. I use service called Mozy, which automatically backs my photos and videos to online location. This is important added security in case of fire or theft in your apartment. There are several companies who offer this kind of backup services and we will discuss more about them later.

If you own or are planning to buy a HD video camera, you should definately consider buying a network hard drive as you will very soon run out of hard drive space.

Share dimension also relates to distributing you photos and videos to family and friends. There are several options available nowadays, such as Google Picasa, Flickr and Mobile Me. Furthermore, some sites are more focused on sharing video like Youtube and Vimeo.