Pogoplug - two weeks on...

I'm pleased to report that my Pogoplug is still going strong (unlike some of the disks I've attached to it - they really don't like being thrown around do they?). It had it's stiffest test last weekend when I stayed over at my girlfriend's house and I turned off my iMac at home, relying solely on the Pogoplug and a cloned copy of the iMac hard drive, with access through my MacBook Pro laptop.

Now that the OS X Pogoplug application is working properly on the MBP I was fairly confident that everything would work fine and dandily, and sure enough I booted up the MBP and with the Pogoplug application set up to open automatically I was reassured to see the shared disks appear on the desktop, clearly identified by their shocking pink icons. I clicked on the WD Passport drive I had earlier cloned from the iMac boot drive, and there in Finder was exactly what I expected to see, namely a full working copy of my iMac startup disk. I started to click down through to my User folder - it took ages...In fact it took so long that I figured that something was very wrong so I quit the application and fired up Safari.

I've bookmarked my My Pogoplug:View web site which is the page where your personal Pogoplug configuration can be accessed so I went straight to it. Everything looked fine - the disk was mounted and visible. I started clicking down through the folders as I had with the OS X application, and everything worked fine. There was a slight time lapse, but I was on a wireless connection and my girlfriend's broadband is not the zippiest in the world so I wasn't unduly worried.

Knowing that the connections at both ends were sound, I retried the Pogoplug application. This time I was much more successful - the disks mounted, and I was able to navigate around my remote disk without any problems. Again the slight time delay was present, but it wasn't abnormal, and certainly didn't prevent me from working.

I'm not sure what caused the initial glitch on the application side, but I haven't been able to repeat it.

So, at last I have a working solution to my remote access problem. I'd still be happier to have the iMac fully functional and without the ever present network problems that more and more people seem to be reporting. But I'm pleased that this solution is also a bit cheaper and greener by not having the iMac powered up for long periods in my absence.

Pogoplug - you're a star - in fact you get five stars !