I got my Cloudstor Pro this week. So far so good. I've got five computers on the home network and everything seems to work ok (except possibly some transcoding issues which I'm trying to get an answer to from tech support). Here are afew things I think you might be interested in:
1. Copying files works pretty **bleep** smoothly. You can go through the internet using the website, but I chose not to (why go across the net when the PCs are all on the LAN). You can also download and install the PogoPlug Drive software from the d/l page. It gives you drive-letter access to the Cloudstor. Then you can just drag/drop the files to the Cloudstor like you would with any file(s). This works strictly across your LAN.
2. The PogoPlug Drive software has a feature called active copy. I haven't turned it on yet, but as I understand it, you activate this feature on for whatever folder(s) you want and it keeps them constantly synced between the PC and the Cloudstor.
3. There does NOT appear to be any backup software included aside from this "active copy" feature. However, if you use the drive-letter-access you should be able to use any backup software to schedule your backups. Just make the destination drive the Cloudstor.
4. Also, as I understand it video files are transcoded to H.264 format (although it looks like you can turn this off in settings). This is supposed to make them more conducive to streaming (less bandwidth intensive). It is also my understanding that the transcoded file replaces the original (so, for example, if you copy a DivX/AVI file to the Cloudstor and have transcoding turned on, it's gonna end up in a different format. Not a bigproblem, but if you later download it off the Cloudstor to a laptop, for example, it might not play if you don't have software to play that format.
5. With regard to the Pogoplug drive software I'm currently having an issue: on my old WinXP it has a feature called remote access. This allows me use the Cloudstor interface to access files that are on that computer (i.e. even files that are not on the Cloudstor). It's a handy feature, but it does not appear to be available on the Win7 64-bit version (I can't figure out why. I've emailed tech support and am awaiting an answer).*
Sorry to be so longwinded. Hope some of this is interesting/useful.
* Over the weekend I played with this. It seems the 64-bit version doesn't have the remote access feature; but I then installed the 32-bit version and now it's there. Guess it's just not in the 64-bit version.
