

A large music or movie collection will easily exceed 100 gigabytes, and from that scale onwards it can make financial sense to build your own cloud.įor comparison, Amazon Drive charges US$12 (RM48) a year for 100 gigabytes of storage, while 1 terabyte costs US$60 (RM242) per year.Ī mid-range router costs around US$130 (RM525) and a hard drive around US$60, with the advantage that they can distribute data within the household at high quality. Those details should never be stored in the cloud anyway, regardless of whether it's your own cloud or one provided by a service provider.Ĭost is another factor to consider when deciding whether to store your data on the home network or online.

Luckily, hackers aren't very interested in a private photos or someone's music collection what they really are after is sensitive information such as bank account details. However, one issue is that the frequency of router security updates varies greatly between manufacturers. In that case, the most up-to-date software is essential. While the major providers of cloud services are obliged to provide security for the data that they store, the home network is the responsibility of the homeowner. But to set up the device for remote access, you'll need to go into the router's settings. One of these connected devices can be a USB stick or a hard drive. Routers today not only ensure that you can access the Internet at home, they also connect the devices in the home via cable or WiFi and allow the exchange of data between them. "Not so long ago, that was relatively complicated," says Hannes Ruegheimer, a home network expert with Connect magazine.

But you can also build your own networked online storage using your home network.Īll you need is a USB stick or an external USB hard drive: Plugged into a modern router with a media server, they become a data store for the home network. Cloud storage services from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Dropbox offer access to photos, movies and documents everywhere and on any device as long as you have Internet access.
