Your Own Personal Cloud Service

Way back when I was in college, I was the historian for our chapter of Delta Sigma Pi, the business fraternity that was the catalyst for my relationship with Scott. I loved taking pictures, organizing them and creating fun scrapbooks. Back then, we snapped pictures with normal cameras then took them to a store to have the film developed. If we wanted to use them for scrapbooks or sharing, we had additional copies made. In addition to the developing costs, we paid something like a nickel or dime per picture printed. It was expensive, especially since we paid for every image no matter how blurry, dark or messed up it was.

Fast forward 12 years when we found out I was pregnant after already coming to accept that I would never be a mother. Because my road to motherhood had been so difficult, I vowed to capture my daughter’s life so I could scrapbook, share photos or do whatever I wanted. For the first two years of her life, I took at least one photograph per day. Most days, many more. And video. I captured a lot of that too. I didn’t like deleting the blurry ones because I could still see glimpses of her personality and life even in the images that any normal person would have gotten rid of. It didn’t cost anything except space on my computer.

Fast forward another 12 years and here we are living in a digital age. Just like photos transitioned from paper to digital format, so did a lot of other things. Kids’ homework, permission slips, spreadsheets, phone books, contracts, tax documents, receipts and more. Everything gets stored on a hard drive somewhere. We take photos with our digital cameras but also with our phones. Even kids are taking quality pictures and showing how life looks through their eyes. Not only are we finding that we save everything on our computers, we have discovered the need to be able to access it on the go. The most important and mobile things (like address books and phone numbers) are stored on our mobile devices but there are a lot of times when we need access to other documents as well.

If you own a mobile device then you no doubt have heard about “the cloud”. Do you know exactly what that is? I consider myself to be pretty educated on technology but I learned something new recently. I always thought the cloud was a service that was maintained by some outside company, saving whatever files I indicated on some remote server somewhere. I decided to ask my friends on Facebook and found that they thought the same thing.

“Data center somewhere”, “offsite server”, “stored in data centers all around the world” and “not saved on my computer” were common responses. My favorite was “not in a reliable place.”

What I discovered is that saving to “the cloud” has become a generic term for saving data remotely. The location can be anything from the company that runs your phone to a multi-billion-dollar entity. But did you know YOU can have your very own personal cloud right in your very own home that allows you to save your own data in a location that you have control over? Me either. Until now.

I now have a cloud on a shelf in my home. It’s hooked up to a battery backup, onto my network and available for me to upload my own photos, videos, music and documents from (drumroll, please) anywhere I have internet or WiFi. I can back up my phone to the WD My Cloud Mirror instead of some major corporation’s cloud service. All those photos I have taken of my girls over the years and all the documents related to SahmReviews can now be store on a drive that I can access on the road. We’re even researching whether we can have our daughters upload their schoolwork to their own folder!

The price is affordable because it can serve as a backup system for important documents. In the past, we have burned data to CDs or Zip drives then sent them to relatives living elsewhere. If there is ever a fire, I know copies of important files and documents are secure outside our home. The My Cloud Mirror has the benefit of running a mirror drive so it self-copies. If one drive fails, the other is the backup.

It’s easy, too. With sync features for your computer as well as apps for your mobile devices, setting up your cloud preferences can be done in a matter of minutes! If you’ve ever been skeptical about using cloud services, check out the WD My Cloud products. The person in control of it is you. Learn more about WD products by following them on Facebook and Twitter. If you’re looking for a gift idea for someone, the WD My Cloud products are perfect for anyone who wants to have backups of their data.

Have you considered having a cloud in your home?