This is an IT question that relates to climbing for reasons that I'm about to explain. It's aimed at anyone with experience or knowledge of Seagate as a company, their products and aps, of domestic, networked hard drives of other makes, of dealing with John Lewis as a supplier or of mobile technology in general.
I'm finding myself taking a lot of photographs outdoors and doing things with them 'on the road', so when I came to replace an ailing and elderly Apple Macintosh laptop, I decided to go for a radically different solution for my IT needs. I bought an iPad, a keyboard for it and a networked Seagate hard drive that I hoped to access directly from all the computers in the house and also over the internet when on the move. The hard drive is a central part of this new configuration because it's supposed to be independent of any of the computers in the house. As for the front-end stuff, when I'm out climbing, I am able to get back to the camp site, upload pictures from my camera to my iPad (that's done, tested and works), set up my smartphone as a mobile data hotspot and post from my iPad to Facebook (that works too), so in theory, I'm on my way to having a proper 21st century IT configuration.
But in order for other things to happen, I need to be able to access other data which may not be online but which might be on my drive at home. The Seagate hard drive ought to be able to do that, or so it claims. I have it connected to my internet router (via an ethernet cable) and I've set up the drive, which I've loaded already with a fair amount of data. However, far from being an 'always on' solution, every time a computer on the network is shut down, the Seagate disappears from view on that computer it restarts and so the drive has to be switched off and switched on again (a 10 minute operation while it goes through its 'detection' routine) in order for it to reappear. So I'm no better off than I would have been with a regular plug-in USB hard drive that would cost a third of the price of the Seagate.
As for connecting to it from my iPad - in the house, I can get to shared data over the home wifi network via the 'SeagateMedia' app. This has all the hallmarks of a 'work in progress', for example when I first used it to get into folders, the photos appeared in a completely random order and the means to re-sort photos by date or title was greyed out. I found a Seagate support forum but when I tried to log in, using the ID I had already registered with Seagate in the setting up process, my login was not recognised. I found their Facebook page and was told in answer to my post there that "Currently, we do not have any Seagate forums available as the "Communities" site was recently removed." I put my question about the sort function to their Facebook page and got no answer, but a week later it was suddenly working, so someone obviously took note but didn't want to talk about it. When I try to connect to their 'Backup' app, the email address that I registered when I set up the drive did not work and the same happened when I tried their 'Global Access' app which is presumably the one I need to get to my drive over the open internet (i.e. when I'm away). Presumably I could register again via each app but that would be self-defeating because that would then create a different account from the one associated with the disc drive and that wouldn't then be recognised.
Not having so far got anywhere with Seagate, I tried John Lewis's technical helpline but to no avail. They didn't know the product though it was on their database - I had to wait 15 minutes while the guy read out stuff from a manual I had already downloaded and read, presumably for his own elucidation though not for mine, then he told me to contact the store branch I bought it from. All they could suggest is that I brought it in for them to look at, a costly and time-consuming process for me. I am reaching the end of the 28 day period in which I could return it if I chose; I really don't want to do that if I can get it to work but John Lewis don't seem to want to help me to help them to avoid the costs of re-stocking it, which of course will cause me a load of hassle as well.
Anyone here know owt about this stuff?
Post edited at 19:49