Okay, you know how it is, you're in the pub talking about something and you say "I have photos of that in the house". So, I'm thinking is it possible to connect an external hard drive to my BT hub/router and connect to it remotely in the pub to view my photos? Hope that makes sense
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sorted byIt would be easier to set up cloud storage, 15GB can be had via OneDrive & Google drive/photos. Dropbox, Deego, Flickr, etc... Free cloud storage options exist and you have the added bonus of having a secondary storage location/backup.
How much data are we talking? Could you upgrade your phone storage?
For 2.5 inch hard drives IE laptops you can get a cheap 3 to 6 quid usb to sata adapter
For 3.5 inch hard drives which I think you are you need a 9 to 15 quid adapter that takes a PSU. I got one of them but ironically I use the same power supply as for the router. You cannot power big 3.5 inch hard drives from usb only. Even tried dual usb connectors but no luck.
if you've got 500+ gb of photos you could upload to cloud storage but would probably need to pay for that amount of storage in one place. you used to get a 50gb free mega account but they are now 25gb. you could find just the photos you wanted to show and upload to that and you can use the mega app on phone/tablet/pc etc
you can get external drives that act like NAS drives and connect to your router, or devices that can take a usb drive and operate like a NAS. once the drive is network connected you can set it to allow the files to be seen outside of your LAN
if you only have one drive and it's not backed up i'd suggest getting another drive as you can get a 1tb drive for about £30, WD refurb 2tb drives are often around that price, unless you don't think losing all your photos is worth £30. power issue, drop it, spill on it and you can stop it working and not be able to recover it. recovery services are usually so expensive it's not worth it, unless the drive isn't really completely knackered and you can stick it in a new caddy, but that's still more money and hassle and you need another drive to transfer it to in order to recover the files instead of leaving them on a damaged drive
Flickr used to offer 1TB free and then decided to move to a pay model.
An easier, cheaper way would be to copy the files to microSD cards - if your phone can read them you could make do with just the 1 high capacity version (or buy cheaper smaller capacity ones). As they are so small there would be little effort carrying them about (although I guess it depends how sober you are when it comes to swapping them out!).
Personally if you are relying on pictures to tell a story you need new friends...
It's not quite fast enough to stream video over from as it's quite old but it's pretty nippy at loading to and from.
And it's usefull just to offload videos etc from the mobile phone and free up storage.
I also have my cctv uploading any motion detection there.
If your router has a VPN server then you could use that to connect to your home network remotely and access those files that way, otherwise you'll need to use a more flexible computer than your router, something that could run a file server, VPN server, remote desktop or something else that'd let you do this.
The openwrt router could also double as an extra wireless AP and serve the files off a USB storage device. Would also need to register with a free DDNS service.
A raspberry PI running wireguard or Openvpn would be another low power option.
Whilst you'll probably not get such a capable device for such a low price now I wouldn't really recommend it anyway, there are much more flexible solutions available...