Personal cloud solutions--own your data

I’ve written in the past about how personal data in the cloud space is not absolutely safe. The cloud is convenient, providing a much-needed resource to consumers and businesses alike. The only problem is that the reliability and security of such services has been called into question. Amazon’s web services lost a portion of customer data while a recent outage, and Dropbox’s security and customer data privacy have been called into question.

What if you have one computer with you

But what if you have one computer with you, and your other one is turned off? Or if you only have one computer, and it’s at home and turned off? Then, Pogoplug makes devices for personal and business use also, which allow you to leave the device running at home with external USB drives attached to it. Through a simple web interface you can access all of the data stored on your Pogoplug unit.

While I quite like Pogoplug, it didn’t have a Unix version that I could install on my Ubuntu server other than the simple drive access program. That would be fine if only I was using it, nevertheless there are some very non-tech-savvy people in my family and I didn’t want to confuse them. In the main the Windows version would work just fine, yet I do not leave my laptop turned on 24/7. As well, since I have a server, I didn’t actually want to buy another device to keep running constantly in my home.

I started shopping around and in the end settled on Tonido. Like Pogoplug, Tonido has software and hardware options. Tonido as well has music and video streaming which is a neat bonus. The software works on Windows, OS X and Linux, and like Pogoplug has mobile apps for all of the major smartphone platforms.

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