Best solution for backing up/managing personal media?

[c1000]

I am a Macbook Air user. My wife uses a Windows laptop. Between us, we also have two iPads, an iPhone and an Android phone. We have always been terrible about backing up files. I bought an external hard disk 3 years ago for Time Machine, backed up my MBA a few times, then forgot all about the drive. We are now running out of capacity on all our devices + accumulating photos and videos of our baby on various cameras.

After some basic research, it seems that a home NAS/personal cloud setup might be the way to go. We are lazy & simple people, so any solution requiring significant effort will probably not be used. I like the idea of not relying on a commercial cloud service. In the Apple product universe there is the airport time capsule, but it doesn't offer any mirroring...so as we are looking to shift the primary storage off our personal devices, it won't offer any backup. The WD My Cloud Mirror seems to be simple to set up but I read mixed reviews about reliability. I also don't understand the pricing logic (why is 8TB > 2x 4TB?). Other offerings from Synology/QNAP are well reviewed, but seem complicated with options galore.

Any suggestions? Ideally a solution where I can access all media via iPhoto and other apps while having the actual files stored externally...plus Windows/Android compatibility would be great.

 

[firedept]

Seagate makes a decent NAS Personal Cloud that would meet your needs perfect. I personally have one myself for my families use. It is used by 2 MBP's, an iMac, 2 iPad's & 3 iPhone's for storage purposes. It gives them their own personal cloud. Mine is a single 5TB HDD. I could have gotten the 2 x 4TB HDD which would have allowed me to run it in a RAID setup or allow for larger storage size (8TB). By RAID I mean I could have mirrored the drives in case one of them ever failed, then at least I would have a duplicate to fall back on. But as I have a Promise Pegasus R2 that I copy the Seagate too, I have no need for the 2 drive NAS.

Windows and OS X compatible. Extremely simple to setup. Once setup, there really is nothing to do unless you want to add additional apps or features to it. Comes with 2 years warranty and it only cost me $200 CDN on sale at Best Buy. Really excellent NAS setup which would probably fit your needs perfect. Check it out at the link I supplied.