To access home computer's data from afar, try Pogoplug
— -- You're on a business trip when you realize important files you need to work on are on the computer at home. Or perhaps you want to share pictures of the newborn with grandma but don't want to take the time to upload them.
A new $99 white contraption called Pogoplug promises to bail you out. And unlike other remote computing solutions, Pogoplug is relatively simple and fast to set up and use, notwithstanding a couple of minor activation challenges.
When you plug Pogoplug into your home network router (via ethernet cable) and plug a USB hard drive into Pogoplug, you can remotely access and share files on that drive over the Internet.
You don't have to load software or muck with networking settings. And despite a few drawbacks — it didn't work with all of the portable USB drives I plugged in — the device pretty much lives up to its billing. In the netbook age in which folks may not have a lot of storage on the machine they're traveling with, accessing files from afar may make sense.
I first saw Pogoplug at the Consumer Electronics Show in January but the device, from San Francisco-start-up Cloud Engines, only started shipping this week. Among its potentially useful stunts:
•Tap in from anywhere. If you're in a hotel room and must edit a document left behind at home, you can remotely fetch it onto the laptop or netbook you have on hand, provided you have Internet access. When done editing, you can upload the file back onto the home drive.
You fire up your browser, go to my.pogoplug.com, and log in. Alternatively, you can download software onto your PC or Mac that will let you access files on your computer through Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, just as if they were "local" drives. (You still need Internet access.)
•Sharing. You can designate pictures, music and videos you want to share with friends, family or colleagues. Instead of uploading files to some website, you provide e-mail addresses for each person you want to share with, and Pogoplug will notify them via a link. You can also check a box to bestow uploading privileges to these folks. And you can create an RSS feed so that when you make changes to the folders containing your shared files, the people you are sharing with will automatically get the updates. This might be a neat way to automatically dispatch pix to grandma's digital photo frame.
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