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whats the EASIEST way to remotely access a hard drive when your away from your house? I'm talking about a way that is secure, and least expensive to run.

I know a way to share a hard drive securely across a lan, and it does not involve having a PC constantly running all the time to act as a server, it also has an application that you run on your laptop that mounts the drive as a local drive letter.

is there any way to do this but over the internet? even if i need to use different software program?

You need a computer always on for this in my mind, to have anything that is somewhat secure.
I've used both of these solutions and built cheap boxes using the Atom processor. I like WHS the most for its simplicity.
FreeNAS
Windows Home Server

Or you could just use one of the online drive mirror solutions where your pc is constanty synchronizing the folders you want. So your data is always available without a pc being on...

Hmm, this should be simple to do. with NDAS you have a client, and it looks for a networked hard drive on your lan, you dont need drivers or to configure ip/='s or any of that fun stuff when its on your home lan, but I'm no rocket scientist, they can easily allow it to access the drive over the internet, you would need to tell the guest client the host's ip, and open the necssarily ports in the firewall, and it would be still secure, since NDAS is uncrackable. Guess no one wants to make money.

I am thinking about going with the online drive mirror solutions, it seems the easiest when I don't feel like connecting to my work's VPN

p.s. Thanks Hardkore

Nothing is uncrackable ;)

The ease of the online drives makes it hard to beat, and theres a bunch out there that give a good amount of drive space for free. Free is good!

But I still like my WHS, its saved my ass a few times when I cratered my hard drive and needed to recover.

freeNAS is alright.. I've been running it for a year, but it has lots of flaws that make it a hassle if you're not a keen nerd.

I have mine accessible over the webs with a little bit of port forwarding and dynamic DNS hocus-pokery, but it's not ideal to say the least.

If you want to share files across the web, I'd look into the cloud computing solutions like drop box (2GB with the free account). Tho, not particularily secure.

Depending on your budget, TigerDirect has (or at least had) the HP MediaSmart EX485 for $375 comes with a 750GB drive installed. I picked one up and added a 1.5TB drive to it.

It's a pretty sweet unit, has 4 expansion bays (one comes filled). It runs WHS, you can expose it to the web and comes with a decent web interface, you can stream to your iPod Touch/iPhone and PS3. Happy with it so far.

http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaign...rt-server/

I use my Mobile Me account. But I'm a mac dork.

I was looking to do the same,
I found this product, http://www.pogoplug.com
I think you can order through tigerdirect.

What about using Remote Access?

Or, another one (and quite frankly, easier to set up) TeamViewer
it's remote access but through their client. you can transfer files back and forth over it too. Let's you control the computer, remotely. Hell you could e-mail yourself the files using it if you had to.

it wouldn't work.. as the laptop I am using outside of the office is the one that is from the office. so there is no machine in the office.

i will try an online account and have windows automatically mount it as a drive letter every time the pc starts, and write a batch file to sync the files automatically.

paolo,Apr 13 2010, 07:57 PM Wrote:it wouldn't work.. as the laptop I am using outside of the office is the one that is from the office.  so there is no machine in the office.

i will try an online account and have windows automatically mount it as a drive letter every time the pc starts, and write a batch file to sync the files automatically.
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once you mount the drive in windows, you could use synch toys (for xp), or the windows synch center (vista/windows 7) to synch the files.

thanks, synch toys for xp it is... since my business machine is running xpsp3