Personal Servers - Act II
There is a new crop of devices coming to market that are designed to provide both peace of mind and new capabilities to home users who are now using PCs as repositories for their digital lives. A few years ago, Memora launched a personal server appliance. They are out of business though Google still has some cached information. Their focus was primarily on storing, organizing and sharing photos and music.
A new personal server/appliance from Mirra is leading with automatic backup as their value prop closely following with secure remote access and sharing (photos, music, files). Here's a good roundup article from NWFusion. Several limitations of the device are obstacles for me such as no support for Windows 98SE. The Mirra server is a Linux box that requires a client application to talk to it. Once connected to your DSL router the Mirra appliance talks to the Mirra servers to allow for secure remote access - In the past, this required poking a hole in your router's firewall - they seem to have been able to overcome this somehow.
Like other photo-sharing approaches, I assume the Mirra photo app allows you to send invites to friends & family who then need to set up an account at mirra.com to access the files/photos you have chosen to share with them. If talked about this before - this is where using RSS would be really cool so that every time new content was added to a shared folder, notification would be available through a feed with a thumbnail of the photo. In some way the Mirra photo app and appliance can be used to run your own personal Ofoto service (the sharing part, not the printing) off of your server not some disk farm in the cloud. I'm sure some will find this attractive as Mirra solves the static IP problem by routing the access through their network.
Something that needs to be figured out is how all of this stuff works in practice in the digitally-enabled home. I get a little hung up on how to use a Mirra-device to manage the central repository of my digital images on my home network. Today, I connect my cameras to an older PII machine I have on the network with a 60 Gb drive and store the original files in date-coded folders. It has a CDRW drive so I can do periodic backups (I usually don't delete the files from the camera or memory card until I have a copy written on CD). I just hit a big snag since Adobe decided not to support Win98SE in version 2.0 of Album.
In conclusion, I think the Mirra or a network attached server/appliance like it is one of the pieces of the puzzle, though still not a real solution. I'm also not sure that I want my friends & family making their way to a machine on my network to get photos. I always liked the idea of having a 20 Gb drive inside a gateway so that you could put your shared data on the other side of the firewall. Maybe if the Mirra could automatically talk to my Shutterfly or Ofoto account to upload the pictures I wanted to share and print. With the billions of images now being captured in digital form, these management/organization/storage/backup/sharing issues are fertile ground for some innovation.
There is a new crop of devices coming to market that are designed to provide both peace of mind and new capabilities to home users who are now using PCs as repositories for their digital lives. A few years ago, Memora launched a personal server appliance. They are out of business though Google still has some cached information. Their focus was primarily on storing, organizing and sharing photos and music.
A new personal server/appliance from Mirra is leading with automatic backup as their value prop closely following with secure remote access and sharing (photos, music, files). Here's a good roundup article from NWFusion. Several limitations of the device are obstacles for me such as no support for Windows 98SE. The Mirra server is a Linux box that requires a client application to talk to it. Once connected to your DSL router the Mirra appliance talks to the Mirra servers to allow for secure remote access - In the past, this required poking a hole in your router's firewall - they seem to have been able to overcome this somehow.
Like other photo-sharing approaches, I assume the Mirra photo app allows you to send invites to friends & family who then need to set up an account at mirra.com to access the files/photos you have chosen to share with them. If talked about this before - this is where using RSS would be really cool so that every time new content was added to a shared folder, notification would be available through a feed with a thumbnail of the photo. In some way the Mirra photo app and appliance can be used to run your own personal Ofoto service (the sharing part, not the printing) off of your server not some disk farm in the cloud. I'm sure some will find this attractive as Mirra solves the static IP problem by routing the access through their network.
Something that needs to be figured out is how all of this stuff works in practice in the digitally-enabled home. I get a little hung up on how to use a Mirra-device to manage the central repository of my digital images on my home network. Today, I connect my cameras to an older PII machine I have on the network with a 60 Gb drive and store the original files in date-coded folders. It has a CDRW drive so I can do periodic backups (I usually don't delete the files from the camera or memory card until I have a copy written on CD). I just hit a big snag since Adobe decided not to support Win98SE in version 2.0 of Album.
In conclusion, I think the Mirra or a network attached server/appliance like it is one of the pieces of the puzzle, though still not a real solution. I'm also not sure that I want my friends & family making their way to a machine on my network to get photos. I always liked the idea of having a 20 Gb drive inside a gateway so that you could put your shared data on the other side of the firewall. Maybe if the Mirra could automatically talk to my Shutterfly or Ofoto account to upload the pictures I wanted to share and print. With the billions of images now being captured in digital form, these management/organization/storage/backup/sharing issues are fertile ground for some innovation.
posted by MyronK @ 4:02 PM
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