Moving your entertainment media and other important stuff to “the cloud” (or, rather, “a cloud”) is becoming the next big thing. For example, Apple‘s latest foray into shackling our hearts and minds to their view of, well, everything called iCloud will essentially move your entire life media resources and everything else into Apple’s cloud to be consumed where and when you please.
Of course, if you’re on one of the cell phones plans with a monthly cap and going beyond that limit involves something along the lines of sacrificing your first born, you may want to be judicious about how you interpret the idea of “anytime and anywhere.”
Even so, while Apple’s plans for world domination, er, sucking us all into the iCloud, are still in the formative stages, there are many other companies that want to play in the same market. Consider my focus for this week: MiMedia.
MiMedia provides what is, in many ways, a standard online backup service with realtime backup of your PC’s content (Windows only at present but OS X is in the works) and streaming playback of your media and access to the rest of your files.
MiMedia claims to use “multiple highly secure Tier 1 data center facilities” which implies your data is safe from anything and everything short of a subpoena … note that in common with most online backup services once your content is on the MiMedia servers it is not encrypted such that only you have access.
The Web front end also supports sharing of content and the free MiMedia iOS apps extend the service into the Apple world.
But as MiMedia likes to point out, establishing your online archive is a painfully slow process when you have large amounts of content on your PC. To get your online archive started MiMedia offers with paid subscriptions to send a portable drive to you via snail mail. You just load the drive up with your content, hand it to the mailman, and when the drive arrives at MiMedia HQ, the contents are copied to your account.
So, instead of waiting 20 or 30 days for your online archive to be up to date, you only have to wait two or three days. Nice idea! Of course, it will most likely be hard (and expensive) for the company to defend this jump start concept but for now, it’s a great idea, particularly for all of you folks with huge media libraries.
MiMedia offers a very generous free plan that provides 7GB of storage while their Premium account allows for 250GB of storage for $9.99 per month or $99 per year. And note that this storage can be added to by any number of computers you please.
For people with serious media hoarding problems, MiMedia also offers 500GB and 1TB accounts for $20 and $30 per month respectively.
