![]() It doesn’t help that Pogoplug advertises its add-on services in confusing or annoying ways. ![]() If you want to divvy up your Pogoplug storage among family members, each with their own private access, you’ll need a $20 per year Pogoplug Family account. You can’t password-protect shared folders without a Pogoplug Team account, which costs $15 per user, though you can share unsecured links for free. ![]() On the downside, Pogoplug weakens its own value proposition by hiding some features behind paywalls. (Related: I wish Pogoplug’s desktop software automatically grabbed photos from SD cards and digital cameras, as Dropbox can.) I do wish, however, that you could direct these uploads to their own folder, so they’re not mixed up with photos from other sources. This is one of Pogoplug’s best selling points, because with a big enough hard drive you don’t have to worry about hitting storage limits, as you would with Dropbox’s automatic photo backups. Pogoplug’s mobile apps can automatically back up photos from your smartphone. The only major missing feature, on Android handsets in particular, is the ability to download files in batches. The apps have a simple design with folders for music, photos and video, and they have built-in media players as well. On the road, you can access your Pogoplug files through mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. My only complaint with the desktop software is that it doesn’t back up files when the program is minimized to the system tray, but that’ll change in a software update coming this week, according to Pogoplug’s chief product officer, Jed Putterman. It creates a separate drive on your computer, so you can drag and drop files, and it also lets you select folders on your PC to backup automatically. The desktop software is like a cross between SugarSync and Dropbox. At that point, you can upload and download files in any web browser, but you’ll also want to install Pogoplug’s companion software for Windows, Mac or Linux. Then, visit Pogoplug’s website to activate the device and set up an account. Just plug the Pogoplug into an outlet, hook it up to your router and connect the hard drive. I really like the idea of Pogoplug and want it to be good enough to replace true cloud storage services, but my concerns about reliability would make me hesitant to buy one. Considering that Google Drive costs $50 per month to store 1 TB of data, you’ll come out ahead pretty quickly with a $50 Pogoplug and a 1 TB external hard drive, which currently costs about $100.Ĭloud Engines, the company that makes Pogoplug, lent me a Series 4 device and a 1 TB external drive for review. ![]() A $100 “Series 4” model adds a USB 3.0 slot and supports USM storage. ![]() The basic Pogoplug hardware costs $50 and includes a USB 2.0 slot for connecting external thumb drives and hard drives, plus an SD card slot. That way, you can backup your data and access it from any device at any location without recurring charges. Pogoplug offers an alternative: Pay once for the hardware to create your own “personal cloud” at home, and supply your own storage. But to store an entire hard drive’s worth of data with any of these services, you’ll have to pay hefty, recurring costs. Follow Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive and SugarSync, there are plenty of options for backing up your files online. ![]()
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