iCloud is a move in the right direction, but without the ability to store all my video in the cloud it's not nearly the solution I need.
Here's the situation: I have roughly 300 GB of music, video, and photos stored on my MacBook Pro's hard drive. I currently back up my entire hard drive to an external drive that my wife also backs up her hard drive to. We have an Airport Extreme network connected to a fiber optic 100 MB up/down local ISP. We also have an Apple TV (Black).
This situation is clearly far from ideal. Those 300 GB of music, video and photos are spread across two laptops and some of it is duplicated. Whenever we want to watch video or play music on the Apple TV we have to make sure the required laptop is on, awake and plugged in. It's silly to take up so much space on both computers with video that we rarely watch. It's silly to take up so much space on both laptops with music that has basically been archived but that we occasionally get the urge to listen to. It's silly to take up so much space on both laptops with photos that we only need every once in a while.
What I want to do is to store all of those videos, music and photos on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that can stream to a set-top media device (Apple TV or otherwise). I then want to back up both laptops to the NAS and then have all the data on the NAS (backups of both laptops and all the music, video and photos on the NAS) backed up to the cloud (Crashplan or similar). I also want to be able to access all of the information on the NAS over the internet while I'm traveling so that I don't have to worry about taking it with me (although I would load up any movies, music and videos I knew I would need while traveling on my laptop so I had a local copy).
What I wish a manufacturer would provide (ANY manufacturer at this point) is a solution that could do all of that.
Doing a bunch of research it seems that I could hobble something together using a Synology Atom-based NAS heavily modified to run the Crashplan headless client and a jailbroken Apple TV running FireCore to stream media from the Synology. The problem is I don't have any Linux skills and it seems like they would be needed to modify the Synology to run the Crashplan headless client. I'm afraid to spend all that money only to find out that I can't get it up and running myself.
Why can't an OEM provide this solution out-of-the box? It wouldn't have to be with Crashplan or the Apple TV. It's only the concepts that I care about.
Does anybody know of any solutions like this out there or has anybody come up with solutions on their own that don't require a ton of technical knowledge? I can't be the only one that wants something like this.
If iCloud stored all of my music, videos and photos and allowed them to be streamed to all of my devices, that would be a step in the right direction.
Here's the situation: I have roughly 300 GB of music, video, and photos stored on my MacBook Pro's hard drive. I currently back up my entire hard drive to an external drive that my wife also backs up her hard drive to. We have an Airport Extreme network connected to a fiber optic 100 MB up/down local ISP. We also have an Apple TV (Black).
This situation is clearly far from ideal. Those 300 GB of music, video and photos are spread across two laptops and some of it is duplicated. Whenever we want to watch video or play music on the Apple TV we have to make sure the required laptop is on, awake and plugged in. It's silly to take up so much space on both computers with video that we rarely watch. It's silly to take up so much space on both laptops with music that has basically been archived but that we occasionally get the urge to listen to. It's silly to take up so much space on both laptops with photos that we only need every once in a while.
What I want to do is to store all of those videos, music and photos on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that can stream to a set-top media device (Apple TV or otherwise). I then want to back up both laptops to the NAS and then have all the data on the NAS (backups of both laptops and all the music, video and photos on the NAS) backed up to the cloud (Crashplan or similar). I also want to be able to access all of the information on the NAS over the internet while I'm traveling so that I don't have to worry about taking it with me (although I would load up any movies, music and videos I knew I would need while traveling on my laptop so I had a local copy).
What I wish a manufacturer would provide (ANY manufacturer at this point) is a solution that could do all of that.
Doing a bunch of research it seems that I could hobble something together using a Synology Atom-based NAS heavily modified to run the Crashplan headless client and a jailbroken Apple TV running FireCore to stream media from the Synology. The problem is I don't have any Linux skills and it seems like they would be needed to modify the Synology to run the Crashplan headless client. I'm afraid to spend all that money only to find out that I can't get it up and running myself.
Why can't an OEM provide this solution out-of-the box? It wouldn't have to be with Crashplan or the Apple TV. It's only the concepts that I care about.
Does anybody know of any solutions like this out there or has anybody come up with solutions on their own that don't require a ton of technical knowledge? I can't be the only one that wants something like this.
If iCloud stored all of my music, videos and photos and allowed them to be streamed to all of my devices, that would be a step in the right direction.