In our household we don’t have a desktop Personal Computer anymore. Ever since the introduction of the iPad and Cloud services (mostly Google), we don’t have the need for a Desktop in the house anymore. Everyone is using an Android phone or an iPhone, so we synchronize everything with Google and iCloud. But is that a wise decision? There are some interesting questions that come up:

• Should we allow Google and Apple to know everything that we do and make money on that?
• We can’t store movies and books online (yet)

So last year we bought an Synology DS1511+ diskstation  (with 10TB in a RAID 5 configuration). We use that as our PC. Not as the Personal Computer, but as our Private Cloud. We store our pictures, movies, music, documents and even websites (like this one) on it. It sits in our home network and has even a DLNA server build in. So movies and music are available on the home network (and beyond). Having a Samsung LED TV 9well actually two) with build in WiFi sees the DLNA server on the Synology and will play the content without conversions. The Synology now also has its own DropBox  to synchronize content between laptops, phones and tablets. All you need now is fast internet connection in your home and on your mobile devices. We have a 120 Mbit/10 Mbit internet connection and the mobile devices range from 3.6 Mbit to 28.2 Mbit download and 1 Mbit to 5.76 Mbit upload.

So how do we protect our selves from a fatal synology failure? Well simple, we have a backup of the important stuff (not the movies and music) to Amazon S3. Every night we run an incremental backup (pictures, documents, home movies and configuration stuff). This way we are protected against a severe failure of the Synology (well I haven’t tried to restore yet )

More later on some of the other great stuff on the Synology.