External storage for you media
Digital storage is exploding. Our computers are packed with photographs, music, movies and email. Consumers are moving away from their desktops with huge hard drives to smaller, lighter laptops with much less storage capacity.
These intensive libraries require back-up and an external hard drive is an obvious solution. We discussed back-ups in these pages before so all I will say is please back-up your files and ensure your data remains secure and intact.
In this weeks column I want to talk about using an external hard drive as a storage location for your media files. Recently Apple released the new iLife 09 software package with new versions of iPhoto, and iMovie. As I played with these new versions I realized that our families photo collection was spread over two or three computers making finding the photos we wanted to find more difficult. I have an external hard drive kicking around that I used to use as a back-up disc and decided to put it back into service as my photo storage drive.
First, I needed to ensure that all the computers in the house have their sharing feature turned on so that each one can be seen from and accessed by any other. On a Mac you can do this by travelling to your system preferences – sharing – and checking the “file sharing” box and using the up down arrows in the pull down menu to select “read and write”.
I use a wireless router to get to the internet and by attaching my spare drive to the router I can make it assessable to anyone on any computer in the house. I then moved the photo libraries from each computer onto the spare drive. I directly attached the spare drive to each machine to speed the transfer.
The now repurposed drive attached to the wireless router shows up in my Mac’s finder window (Explorer for PC users).
Now if I click on the spare hard drives name in my finder I see all the photos showing up as three separate iPhoto libraries on this drive. I can view each one by double clicking on the icons. There is a longer lag time as the data flows over the wireless network so if was going to spend a lot of time working on them I think I would attach the photo drive to my computer directly. But just to look and find images this system works fine.
Obviously you could use this system to store documents that where shared by a variety of users too.
In other news, Apple has confirmed that it is opening an Apple store in Winnipeg at Polo Park. This will change the face of computer retailing in Winnipeg for both PC’s and Apple.
Apple stores are well known for their “Genius’s” well-trained product specialists that help customers with problems at a counter right in the store, host seminars and offer daily courses in everything from iPhoto and iTunes to video editing and business networking.
This will increase Apple’s visibility, sales and service. I for one can hardly wait!
These intensive libraries require back-up and an external hard drive is an obvious solution. We discussed back-ups in these pages before so all I will say is please back-up your files and ensure your data remains secure and intact.
In this weeks column I want to talk about using an external hard drive as a storage location for your media files. Recently Apple released the new iLife 09 software package with new versions of iPhoto, and iMovie. As I played with these new versions I realized that our families photo collection was spread over two or three computers making finding the photos we wanted to find more difficult. I have an external hard drive kicking around that I used to use as a back-up disc and decided to put it back into service as my photo storage drive.
First, I needed to ensure that all the computers in the house have their sharing feature turned on so that each one can be seen from and accessed by any other. On a Mac you can do this by travelling to your system preferences – sharing – and checking the “file sharing” box and using the up down arrows in the pull down menu to select “read and write”.
I use a wireless router to get to the internet and by attaching my spare drive to the router I can make it assessable to anyone on any computer in the house. I then moved the photo libraries from each computer onto the spare drive. I directly attached the spare drive to each machine to speed the transfer.
The now repurposed drive attached to the wireless router shows up in my Mac’s finder window (Explorer for PC users).
Now if I click on the spare hard drives name in my finder I see all the photos showing up as three separate iPhoto libraries on this drive. I can view each one by double clicking on the icons. There is a longer lag time as the data flows over the wireless network so if was going to spend a lot of time working on them I think I would attach the photo drive to my computer directly. But just to look and find images this system works fine.
Obviously you could use this system to store documents that where shared by a variety of users too.
In other news, Apple has confirmed that it is opening an Apple store in Winnipeg at Polo Park. This will change the face of computer retailing in Winnipeg for both PC’s and Apple.
Apple stores are well known for their “Genius’s” well-trained product specialists that help customers with problems at a counter right in the store, host seminars and offer daily courses in everything from iPhoto and iTunes to video editing and business networking.
This will increase Apple’s visibility, sales and service. I for one can hardly wait!
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