Oh man! Just as I’m getting used to Cloud. You know, because it came for free with my iMac. Now the guy at the Wall Street Journal says it’s yesterday’s news. Trendies, you see, are already backing up their devices to, not to mention streaming off, personal storage devices that are connected to the Cloud, yet physically located in the home, where, of course, their hearts are. Toshiba may be latecomers in this information lottery but, today, on Tuesday, February 4, 2014, they joined the veritable mash, announcing their new Canvio Home Backup & Share network attached storage unit.
I got to check this baby out at CES in Vegas and with the price very much right at US$149, I can’t help but give it a thumb’s-up. As you know, dear reader, complex never works with me. I read “Network Attached Storage” and I’m already halfway to thinking it’s too complicated to set up. But Canvio® Home is set up specifically to address this concern with easy to understand instruction for installation and simple set up software. Set-up is child’s play. Log in, set up and transfer the files you need from elsewhere. A single application with a clear menu and intuitive interface is all it takes.
Convenience is the name of the game if you’ve got a smartphone or a tablet. Whether you’re at work, away on business, across town, stuck in traffic, you know, whatever, if you have Internet access, you’re close to your Canvio® Home. In seconds, just trying it out, you understand, I ping my way in instantaneously and I’m showing a vid I shot of my youngest kid burning out some Steve Cropper riffs on his shiny turquoise Stratocaster, followed by some snaps I took.
Canvio® Home makes you the Home Boy! It’s easy to Stream movies wirelessly to every TV and monitor in your connected home. Likewise listening to your library of iTunes, MP3s, or CD players, including DLNA-compliant home entertainment systems in home stereo systems and smart TVs. You can store, literally, thousands of albums and jams and can connect any or all of it to your network.
Canvio Home Storage NAS device is available in 2TB capacity for $149 and 3TB for $260. Just as with Western Digital’s My Cloud and several other new consumer NAS devices, Toshiba’s Canvio Home allows users to access their files from anywhere they have Internet access. They can also stream music and video to smartphones, tablets, PCs, and DLNA-compliant home-entertainment devices such as home stereo systems and smart TVs.
Last, but not least, the Canvio Home is a single-bay NAS with a gigabit Ethernet interface and a USB 2.0 port for expansion. It’s PC backup software is capable of doing both incremental backups and image-based backups, so that educated consumers will be able to perform bare-metal restores using software the drive will write to a USB memory stick. The NAS device will also use Apple’s Time Machine technology to back up and restore Macs. All bases covered, it seems, and the price is right.
