An alternative way to share our data online

October 4th, 2006

I was thinking about the Bazaar seminar in Barcelona entitled “Hey Dude, Where’s My Data?” and how to manage our data stored in different locations online.

The first thing we have to look is why we are using services such flickr, youtube etc. I believe because we need a fast, free or even cheap, reliable and easy to use place to store our data online. The best of course is to have such a service just for us, managed by us without any ads and data mining. Most of us will say that this is very expensive and probably we don’t have the skills needed to manage a service.

Few days ago an advertisement email arrived in my inbox and it was for a product called Disk Station. The text was starting as “Time to redefine how you share, how you store, and how you connect your data.” Looking at the web site (http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS106serise/index.php) Disk Station is a portable server which has some interesting features copied from product’s web site.

Share More Than just Data
Disk Station integrates so many features you could ever think of in a Home & SOHO environment. It shares data, printer, photo, web, multimedia files and more! Having a Disk Station is connecting all your digital contents. It makes sharing everything easy yet controllable.

Program Your Own Web
Creating your own web site is always a fun thing to do. Disk Station now supports PHP+MySQL. You are free to construct your own web site with dynamic web contents, or to install PHP open source applications from the Internet, such as blog and bulletin board,

Let the Music Play
If you have cool photos, music, and movies, why not share them out? You simply upload the files to Disk Station, hook up a Network Media Player, and you can start enjoying them with your TV or audio set.

Total Backup Solutions
Data backup is so important but people tend to ignore it, Disk Station makes data backup so complete and automatic that backup always be done without your attention. From Network Backup to Local Backup, from USB Copy to PC Backup (Synology Data Replicator II), you can always find the backup alternatives that fit your needs.

Share Photos with Right Persons
Having trouble to share your photos with right persons? Photo Station lets you not only share them with friends through the Internet, but also control who should be able to view which photo albums. You are now the master of your shared photos.

What if plug a Disk Station in a network with static IP and give access to our peers through the internet.  I’m sure some of us now and the rest in 1-2 years will have a lot of bandwidth and a static IP (you can do it even with dynamic IP) to connect such devices on the net. I don’t think that everybody will run a service like flickr but will have the able to run our own services with our own policies using our own hardware which is not very expensive. The price of Disk Station in Greece is 320 Euros.

I’m not trying to advertise any product. I’m trying to share some thoughts on how to use a product like this in terms of sharing our data through the internet.

I’ve already ordered a Disk Station and I’ll try to test it. So in a next post I’ll share my experiences on using it.

Entry Filed under: Repositories, Open Content, Social Software