The benefits of having a digital media center in your home are numerous and diverse. If you are a savvy consumer, you know that there are a lot of services that provide them.
There are many options that can help you manage, store, and share your media. Some of them charge a fee for an access fee, while others just charge to stream media. Some even allow members to save your media. There are many more options out there, so ask your friends, family, and employers about a few different ways that they would like you to store and share your media.
I have a friend who owns his home’s entire media center. While he didn’t want to go too in-depth with a post on our website, he told me that his media center is a big hub that has all of his media. It’s a very large space and works much like a server. He doesn’t use any of these services, but it’s a great alternative.
While I dont use these services myself, there are many others that I would recommend. There is now a group of companies that specialize in media storage and sharing. One is called Cloudfront, they offer media storage on premise and on the cloud. Cloudfront offers your media to the public, so you can store it on your own servers and share it with others. My friend also mentioned a service called MediaLocker.
One of the benefits is that you can choose the storage tier, and then you can choose how far back in time you want to store your files. With Cloudfront, you can choose to store your files up to 5 years. With MediaLocker, you can choose between 5 years or 100 years. This is especially awesome for media you store on the cloud, because your friends can access all of it at once.
If you have a storage server that’s in the Cloud, you can use CloudFront to share your files with the world. CloudFront allows you to set up a virtual URL that points to an Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud storage account. When you put your files onto that account, you’re storing them on your own servers, which means that you’re not sharing them with others.
All the data you store on CloudFront is encrypted, and if anyone could figure out that I, or anyone else, was using CloudFront to store files, they could access all of those files. There are also tools for auditing your storage server. If you store sensitive data that could be used to identify you for other people, this may be an issue.
That said, there are already several products that use cloud storage to make it easier to keep your files private. Dropbox is one of the most popular. It’s free for up to 20GB a month. On top of that, you can also set up your own server for free by signing up for a service like Open Cloud.
Open Cloud is a popular cloud storage service for users that don’t want to set up their own server. Just a note, though, that you can’t really use this to protect your files. It’s all just a way to access your files, so you should assume your files being accessed will be public.
Dropbox has a different model. You sign up for a free two-week trial and then you pay $5 a month for a full year, plus you get a free $100 credit. Once you hit $10 a month, you can get unlimited storage for free. And if you’re not quite ready to sign up for a free two-week trial, you can always choose between the two plans.