Home wifi network drive for mac & pc?

[tkline]

I do a lot of graphic design work and book layouts.. and I would like to have 1 central networked drive where everything is saved, and I can connect to that with my desktop PC in one room, but also be able to connect and work on the same files with my mac laptop from another room (Both running the same versions of Adobe creative suite).

I saw that there's personal cloud drives out there but they seem to be geared more toward storing tons of movies.. will they work with any files? And can they be set up where it's treated like any other drive on my computer? I want something easy to use where I just connect to the drive and start working.

And, since it would be on my home network, would it be possible to connect to it remotely too, just over the internet? I know that will be much slower, but could come in handy sometimes if I'm away...

Can anyone recommend a good one?

 

[Hardware Brad]

Personal cloud drives will work with any files, storing a lot of movies is probably just advertisement. If you set up a NAS in your home, format the drives in exFAT. This will allow you to use both windows and mac to read and write from it. You can also remotely connect to the NAS as well. You can use windows remote desktop or another VPN tool to log into your network from anywhere, as long as it is set up properly with IP address and such.

Be sure to have your data in multiple places at once. If you want to have it all in a central location great, but back it up. Because god forbid if that one NAS drive fails, you'd either lose everything, or have to spend over $1000 for someone to attempt to recover it.

 

[USAFRet]

Be very, very careful about opening it up to the outside world.

My Qnap NAS box was port forwarded through the router to allow me to access it from outside. Between Jan 2017 and yesterday, at least 3 dozen log in attempts to it. All trying to access the default "Admin" account.
Of course, I had that account disabled completely, so no success on their part.

But...Russia, Venezuela, South Africa, Portugal, etc, etc, etc...all trying to get in.

 

[tkline]

Wow.. that sucks. I'll keep it as a local thing then and won't make it available outside. I thought I might need it sometimes, but it would actually be pretty rare Just thought it might be nice but I'd rather keep it secure.

I just have a regular cable modem, is it best to plug it into there with a cable and then access it over wifi from the pc? Some of my project files can get pretty big, will it be really slow going over wifi? Like would I be better off just getting an external drive for my PC and sharing that, and connecting to it with my mac?

I have another external drive that I use for manually backing up stuff, but I'm lazy.. I usually just do it once every other month or so.

 

[USAFRet]

Wow.. that sucks. I'll keep it as a local thing then and won't make it available outside. I thought I might need it sometimes, but it would actually be pretty rare Just thought it might be nice but I'd rather keep it secure.

I just have a regular cable modem, is it best to plug it into there with a cable and then access it over wifi from the pc? Some of my project files can get pretty big, will it be really slow going over wifi? Like would I be better off just getting an external drive for my PC and sharing that, and connecting to it with my mac?

I have another external drive that I use for manually backing up stuff, but I'm lazy.. I usually just do it once every other month or so.

If your router supports a USB drive, that is probably the easiest way.
Just access it from the PC and/or mac.
Large files won't be any slower than transporting to any other system in your LAN. It is only as fast as your WiFi...