Home, Sweet Home. NAS and WiFi picture backup

At home I have a NAS box. I originally purchased one of these because I’ve somehow used all the storage that my cloud provider had available and the cost to upgrade was nothing short of insane. I’d tried other providers, however the cost, the reliability, and the fact I had to keep shipping everything around became a concern.

A NAS box, for those who aren’t aware, is a storage device which sits on your home network. It’s just a box with a drive – or multiple drives – inside. You can then backup your documents, your photos and your videos to this box. Everything is then safely stored and you know exactly where to go if you need to retrieve it.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit old fashioned in that respect. Having stuff in “the cloud” is one thing, but my ultra-important memories? I want them somewhere where I can see them and where I can be responsible for them.

However, the mobile software that was provided for the NAS box was properly terrible. Although it looked swish, it didn’t actually perform all the functions it should reliably. Using the official software that came with the NAS resulted in photographs sometimes backing up, sometimes not. It was becoming a weekly task just to check that the backups had performed successfully.

Nobody wants that.

So I stumbled across this Android application. It’s called Sweet Home and is in Alpha at the moment, however there is a donate version too. It may not look the prettiest, but it does the job brilliantly. When I get home it automatically detects that’s my home WiFi is available and backs up all the new photos and videos that I have taken on my handset. You can tell it to backup only when the phone is on charge too.

To be honest with you there’s not a great deal more than I can say about the app. It does its job simply and easily.

There is a simple settings screen where you tell it what you want to backup, then you tell it what your home WiFi is, where your NAS box is, and finally the folder or naming convention you wish to use to backup using.

It’s available here if you want the free Alpha version, but I’ve contributed towards development with this paid-for version, which is only £1.86.

It’ll also backup phone media to a PC or Dropbox.

I like apps like this. No over-zealous adverts, no unnecessary permissions creep, just an app that does what it says on the tin. Boom.