Opinion

posted on 02 June 2008 07:43

Wouldn't it be nice if data storage devices in the home and home office were connected?

Some people have so many digital data islands in their homes that it's like looking at a map of Polynesia, a data archipelago. Me, I'm data poor; there's the digital video recorder, the pair of mobile phones, the two laptop computers, one Apple, one Windows, and the desktop with two non-networked external drives.

Jon Stokes writes in Ars Technica about the problem of synchronising everything with networked devices all over his home. He wants an all-singing, all-syncing software utility which does all the file and data record handling centrally, ensuring that every thing has access to the same set of files, that everrything is in synch and, no doubt, that everrything is backed up and readily recoverable.

You wish. Yes, I really do wish. We can see how the PC world, both Windows and Mac, and the music world and the TV world and the movie world and the telephony world are gradually reaching out to each other but there is a long way to go.

We need a central and networked data and file-holding facility, a network-attached storage (yes, NAS) facility that acts as a backup and data synchronising appliance for all connected home and business devices in the home:

- mobile phones; ring tones, music files, videos, images, phone numbers, etc.

- digital video recorders and their stored TV programmes

- Windows PCs and notebooks - everything, right down to bare metal restore

- Mac desktops and notebooks - ditto

- iPods and the like

- Games consoles.

This device should itself be backed up, it should certainly be RAIDed, and perhaps a cloud backup service would be good here.

What I have in mind is a home information server that also caters for the business person working from home. It can't happen soon enough. Bring it on.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}