Backing up your valuable files and images is a must for any digital photographer – hard drives can fail, so you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket.

While there’s a host of external hard drives on the market, coming in all different shapes and sizes that connect to your computer, the My Book Live from Western Digital is one of the growing number of NAS hard drives. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage.

Rather than attaching directly to your computer via a USB or FireWire connection, the My Book Live connects to your wireless router. So why opt for a NAS drive over a standard hardwire connected option? Because your drive is connected to your network and provided that the drive is left switched on, you’ll be able to 
access its contents anywhere in the world – in effect creating your own personal ‘cloud’ of data.   

To ‘see’ the drive from your computer, the My Book Live is bundled with a software CD so your PC or Mac will be able to find the drive. We installed the software on a MacBook, and the My Book Live was found easily, while there’s also free web access to your My Book Live should you be using another machine. To keep your data secure and ensure that no-one else can get their hands on it, access to the drive is password protected.

If you have a iPhone, iPad or Android device, then you can also access the drive – you’ll just need to download the free WD 2go (file viewer) and WD Photos (photo viewer) apps. We tried this out with an iPhone – it worked a treat, though we found only JPEGs can be viewed, and not TIFFs as well.

You can also set the drive up to wirelessly back-up your PC or Mac’s hard drive, while additional My Book Live drives can be set-up to mirror the first drive offering extra protection from a hard drive failure.



www.wdc.com