Tuesday, March 25, 2008

External hard drives

In my last post, I mentioned that backing up to an external hard drive. Most hard drive manufacturers have already considered this, and sell out-of-the-box backup solutions. Some then take this one step further and add a network port, whether wired or wireless, so that the drive can then be shared between computers on the network.

Western Digital is one of those, but here's a word of warning - if you are a typical home user, do not buy their 1TB My Book World Edition - it very kindly refuses to share any music or video files. So if I wanted to, for example, use it to share the video I took of my sister-in-law's wedding, or of a friend's new-born baby; or if (God forbid!) that I got into podcasting - none of these files that I created could be shared by this device, even on my own private network between my own computers.

Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM.

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