Western Digital’s “My Book Live” is the perfect storage and backup device for those that want to avoid monthly backup fees or insecure cloud based options. While Amazon and Dropbox are truly wonderful places to store your data and pictures, it is a little unsettling that anyone at those companies could access your data despite what they say. In fact, it is truly like having your own cloud drive on your local area network. All computers connected to your network will have access to the public folders on the drive, or you can choose to setup secure password folders using the web based administration system.
This is a multi-functioning backup device. Use Western Digital’s free mobile App to gain instant access to all of your photographs and media files on the go. Instead of trying to copy over photographs to share with your family, use the free App to access a backup copy of all of your photographs anywhere, anytime. The same for streaming to your HD TV – use the built-in media server to access all of your photographs and videos from your TV, Media Player, Blue Ray device, Xbox 350, play station or any DLNA 1.5 UPnP certified device (in other words all of the latest devices!). You can even serve up all of your iTunes music to the family using the included iTunes server so you can centralize your music and video collection and stream it to other computers in your network using iTunes.
Coming with My Book is Western Digital’s backup software call WD Smart
ware which makes backups painlessly automatic and wirelessly. The included version is fine enough, but if you want a few more features you can upgrade to a professional version for $20.
Set up for us was a snap. In just a few minutes, you’re up and running. Mac, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista computers will automatically find your My Book Live drive in seconds. Within 10 minutes from opening the box, we were backing up our computers simply and quickly.
My Book Live is the perfect solution for a local backup solution, so that if your computer hard drive fails, you will not lose all of your hard work, pictures and videos. This device is probably all of the backup hardware that any regular computer owner would need to have. But if you are a power user and want to know how to provide a fail safe environment to backup your data, then watch for our next “Go Wireless” article about setting up such an environment. Protection from electrical storms, a house fire or meteorite hitting your home will be discussed during our next installment!
