Disclaimer: I recently received a second Transporter (Individual) unit from Connected Data in Australia to review how synchronisation worked between individual units on a LAN and WAN, amongst other things. I provided my own hard drive for the second unit. Big thanks to Philippe from Connected Data in Australia for reaching out to me in the first place and Josh from Kayell for organising the unit to be sent my way.

I recently wrote about adding a second Transporter to my home network. This post covers the results of some of the scenarios I wanted to look at from a functionality perspective. The scenarios I worked through included:

• Photo data sync between laptop / Transporter over a LAN and WAN;
• Video data sync between Transporters over a LAN;
• Sharing video files to a non-Transporter user; and
• Accessing files using the mobile app on iOS.

Photo data sync

Photos were pretty easy to move around. For my test data I used a 450MB folder of photos of sneakers. I copied it to the Transporter and noticed within a minute that the Transporter client on my Mac was picking up the changes.

Once the folder was on the Transporter and syncing with my devices I then had a copy of the photos in a number of locations. Pretty simple stuff.

Video data sync

Let’s be clear – copying large files to the Transporter, even over a LAN connection, can be slow. There’s a lot getting in the way of this being a speedy operation, including the fact that the Transporter itself just isn’t a blazingly fast unit. So don’t waste your money putting in a flash drive, or think that this is going to be the right tool in a video rendering workflow – because I don’t think it is.

However, if you keep things simple, and count on stuff taking a little while, you can certainly do a bit with this unit. I copied about 40GB of files directly to the Transporter. It took close to an hour to complete, but I expected it would. While that was happening, a few other things happened. Firstly, the other Transporter on my LAN got the message that there was stuff on the Transporter that should be synchronised. Cool.

Secondly, I could then decide to share the files on a limited basis, either via the Transporter application, or via SMB if I really wanted to. You can read the Transporter FAQ on SMB here.

Note that even when you turn on SMB on the unit, you won’t see the files until you share the folder in question.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll see the files via SMB.

Sharing video files

So now I have about 40GB of video files on my Transporters. What if I want to share those with someone who doesn’t have a Transporter? It’s pretty simple. I can right-click on the file I want to share, create a link, and then send links to people I want to share the files with. Note, however, that links are generated on a per-file basis. You’re better off just inviting  people to access the shared folder.

Another cool thing you can do is control which Transporters will store the files you’re sharing.

I tested playback of the video over both Wifi and LAN connection. The video files were standard definition MPEG files in PAL (720 x 576) format running at about 4Mbps. They played back well with some choppiness. Still, as far as a simple way to distribute a bunch of files, this is one of the easiest ways I’ve found to do it, particularly when it comes to sharing with people outside the network.

Accessing data over mobile

The Transporter mobile app is a snap to use, and works well on both the phone and iPad. I only tested the iOS version, so I can’t tell you how the other flavours behave.

You can do cool things like setting it to automatically upload photos. I can see that this is going to be a handy feature when I’m travelling and don’t necessarily have my Crashplan-protected laptop with me.

Final Thoughts

I gushed about Transporter when I first came across it at SFD7, and after testing the use of multiple units, I’m still a fan. For the most part, it does what it says on the box, and it’s a snap to setup. The key thing for me is the mobile access and ability to securely share files with the outside world in a controlled fashion. I like that there’s a nod to SMB in there, and the ability to create read-only shares as required. I also like that my daughters (both of whom use their iPads heavily for school work) can easily access files at home and at school without bloody e-mailing to me them all the time. I’m giving it two thumbs up – it does what I need it to do. Obviously your mileage might vary.

Disclaimer: I recently received a second Transporter (Individual) unit from Connected Data in Australia to review how synchronisation worked between individual units on a LAN and WAN, amongst other things. I provided my own hard drive for the second unit. Big thanks to Philippe from Connected Data in Australia for reaching out to me in the first place and Josh from Kayell for organising the unit to be sent my way.

Firstly, if you’d like some background on Connected Data, check out my Storage Field Day 7 post here.

Secondly, the Transporter User Guide is the best resource to get started with the Transporter. Most operations with the Transporter are pretty simple, although the user guide provides some useful background on how and why things work the way they do.

My second Transporter arrived without a hard drive, so I went and bought a 1TB 2.5″ WD Blue drive [WD10JPVX] to use with it. I chose this model because it was the same as the one in my first unit, it was reasonably priced, and I’d had some good experiences with WD drives recently. The drive you choose is up to you, although going with an SSD will not improve the performance of the unit. You can find a list of the drive requirements here. Connected Data have also developed a useful video entitled “Transporter Hard Drive Installation Video”.

Once you’ve got your drive in, you’ll want to add the Transporter to your account. If you need assistance with this, the Quick Start Guide is a pretty handy place to start in my opinion.

Once you’re all setup, you can get to the interesting bit – sharing data between Transporters and other users. The first thing to understand is whether you want to store files only on your Transporter, or whether you want the files to sync to the machines you’ve installed the client on as well. The differences between the Transporter folder and Library are covered fairly comprehensively here. Broadly speaking, if I had some photos I wanted to keep a copy of on my Transporter, I’d probably copy them to the Transporter folder and have them synchronise with my laptop and any other Transporters in my control. If I wanted to copy GBs of video, for example, I’d probably store that in the Transporter Library. This would keep the files only on the Transporters, not my laptop as well. Note that the mobile application only downloads files as they’re accessed, it doesn’t automatically download files.

Note also I’m not super interested in performance from a synchronisation perspective, as I’m hamstrung from a WAN perspective with a pretty awful ADSL connection at my house. What I did want to cover, however, was a few of the different ways files could be accessed and move around using these units. These are the scenarios I looked at testing:

• Photo data sync between laptop / Transporter over a LAN and WAN;
• Video data sync between Transporters over a LAN;
• Sharing video files to a non-Transporter user; and
• Accessing files using the mobile app on iOS.

It’s not super scientific, but I was looking at scenarios that I thought would be useful to me as a consumer. Note, also, that for the large data tests, I had the Transporter units and laptop sitting on the same gigabit LAN. In the next post I’ll be running through the results of the testing.