shared usb hard drive mac

[fredT]

I have a spare usb hard drive I would like to put to some use.

Ideally I would like to store all music and photos here and have it accessible for anyone on our home wifi.

The router (virgin) doesn't have a usb port.

Can I hook it up to the Imac and somehow make it accessible to everyone? I would also like to have some documents accessible over the internet, is this possible?

Thanks,
Fred

 

[IanA2]

I have a spare usb hard drive I would like to put to some use.

Ideally I would like to store all music and photos here and have it accessible for anyone on our home wifi.

The router (virgin) doesn't have a usb port.

Can I hook it up to the Imac and somehow make it accessible to everyone? I would also like to have some documents accessible over the internet, is this possible?

Thanks,
Fred

Not an expert but I'm pretty sure you can and someone "with the Knowledge" will be along shortly to tell you how to do it.

 

[Sp!ke]

You could share this drive from a PC or mac with relative ease but making it accessible on the internet securely will be tricky.

It sounds like you should be looking at one of the cloud offerings to suit your requirements. Dropbox, Google drive, Amazon, something like that. You get 15GB free with Google or 100GB free if you buy a chromebook. you get 50GB of dropbox free with Android phones - it might be that you've got a free account somewhere that you're unaware of.

[edit] If you have Amazon Prime, you get unlimited cloud photo storage for free with your account now... This stores your photo's in full resolution and if you have a prime account it would be silly not to take advantage of the offer and backup your photos in the cloud for nothing.


Storing your precious photos on a shared USB disk is a recipe for disaster.