We reviewed the ioSafe 214 storage NAS device a few weeks ago and today wanted to touch upon one of the really cool features with the device, sharing files. This “drive” is really much more than a normal hard drive and can be used in many ways like your own FTP server and as a local file sharing tool. Many times after a shoot is all wrapped up you need to get the final images over to your client. Burning and packaging a CD is becoming a thing of the past and can take up a lot of time. You can use the ioSafe 214 in a few ways to share your work to your clients.
First there are 2 main ways of sharing:
Most of the time you will just need to create a download link and shoot that over to your client, but if you are working on a larger project and need to have some shared folders that others need access to you can create a web login for users to access your drive from anywhere with a internet connection.
Overall it can be very easy to share your work with the ioSafe 214 device however there is some setup involved before you can start creating links and sharing folders. The setup can take some time and since there is a ton that this drive can do the user manual is a whopping 173 pages. But don’t let that scare you they do have a quick connect section in the admin panel that can help you get up to speed quickly. I won’t go through the setup of creating your server in this part of the review and only cover sharing your images.
Creating links to your files
Once you have files on the drive (which can be mounted just like any external drive) there is a web based admin console where you can setup your sharing and view your current files. The creation of a link to a file is easy, in the admin console just navigate over to the file station and you will see your files just like in any finder window. At the top of the window you will see an Action drop down menu. In here click the Share File Links option. This will give you a direct link that you can share with others to access and download the files.
The cool thing is you can always alter these links later and choose to have an expiration date or enable a password for the file. There is also a shared links manager where you can see all shared links that you have out there and disable any if needed.
Creating a user and giving them certain access to your drive
If you wanted to give someone access to your drive you can create user accounts and give them different rights. This is also pretty easy to setup and just like creating links is all done in your admin console. If you go into the control panel there is a User button which will allow you to edit or add new users. All you need to do here is enter in a users name, email and password to create the account.
Then you can give them access to certain folders and have different access rights to those folders.
There are a few other user creation settings that you can setup like application privileges and speed limit settings. Easy to give other users access to your drive.
Overall the ioSafe 2147 drive is much more than just a storage drive. It’s waterproof and fireproof which really make it essential to secure your work and also can function as a little server with all of the sharing possibilities.
Do you have a NAS drive that you use as a personal cloud device? Leave a comment below with what you use and why, I would love to hear from you.
You can pick this NAS up on Amazon here:
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