WD My Cloud Home – Rating: 8/10

 A few weeks ago, I had to send a story on Denmark very urgently and I whipped up the article in an hour. But then I spend the entire day looking for my photographs. All I needed was a couple of photographs and I could not even find where I had saved them. The trip was over a year old and I realized that they were saved in one of my four hard drives but in multiple folders. When I eventually found the file, I realized that none of the pictures had been saved as the memory card had been corrupt. I had lost the phone that was used on the trip and the photos were not backed up either. As I sat there, frustrated, angry and upset, I realized that I had eventually lost all my memories of the destination.

That is when it struck me that I was not just disorganised  but I was a content disaster waiting to happen. As travellers, bloggers, photographers, we are content creators and the most important content that we create is a photograph. Every frame is a memory, a story, an emotion. And when you lose a picture, you lose all of them.

As a traveller and travel photographer, our focus is largely on the creation but there are several challenges after that

• To start with, I need to store them. I travel almost once a month and my photographs are in multiple phones, cameras, laptops and hard drives besides many online storage spaces.
• And sometimes I shoot them on multiple devices – a DSLR, a mobile camera and sometimes even on Go Pro and I forget all about them. Some of them are stored online on dropbox or cloud, but then that does not always help
• I hardly have time for back ups – many times I dump the photos from a memory card or a phone into a portable hard drive and am carrying on to the next trips
• My photos are not organised as well. Pictures from the same trip are in different devices and I forget where they are
• I review a lot of phones and I take pictures and I forget to back up. A couple of my personal phones have been stolen and I have lost these pictures.

So that is when I realized that I need an one stop solution which can sync all my photographs from different devices and also helps me organise them better. I need one storage space, tucked away at home which can automatically like a robot detect all the content from various devices and keep them safe and secure. And that is how a big white box landed on my doorstep to solve all my content needs.

Let me introduce to WD My Cloud Home, which is doing what I would like a genie to do right now.

• So to begin with, I need just two devices to sort my life – my mobile phone and this pretty white box which stands on the corner of my table. Then I need a decent wifi and a mobile app which connects my phone to this device.
• The WD Cloud Home is one storage device that picks up content seamlessly from all other devices such as your mobiles, tablets, desktops, USBs and even your social media channels and organises them in neat simple folders
•  You can control everything from your mobile –  be it searching for the photos, playing a video or even sharing them.
•  All you need is to create an account and let the devices stay connected
• The content is all stored in one lovely little white box which is a panacea for all the problems

As I am writing this post, I have just about started organising my content. It is a huge task ahead of me as I have three phones, two laptops, one tablet and four USB hard disks. And the genie has just started his magic .And  I am sure that I will never again complain about content disasters.

This post was written in collaboration with Western Digital .