While the Mac Pro was expected to be the first machine to launch with the new Thunderbolt 2 standard announced by Intel earlier this year, Apple just unveiled its updated MacBook Pro this week. The 4-terabyte Promise Apollo is a personal cloud device that connects to your router and automatically downloads and saves photos and videos from your smartphone or tablet, so you can make more.
. Pros Easy to set up, access, and share. Automatically uploads phone camera roll. Cons Somewhat sluggish. Not for power users. Can't map drive for direct access.
Must use apps to access storage. Bottom Line The 4-terabyte Promise Apollo is a personal cloud device that connects to your router and automatically downloads and saves photos and videos from your smartphone or tablet, so you can make more room on your devices. The Promise Apollo ($299) is presented as a personal cloud storage solution, but physically it's a simplified device. It is easy to set up on your home network, where it will automatically back up all the snapshots and videos you take on your smartphone. You can also use it to back up and share files on your Macs or PCs, but it's very simplistic compared with a full-service NAS like our top pick, the. Think of it as the personal network storage for those who don't want to muck about with complicated share rules and server settings. The Apollo comes in only one configuration, with 4TB of hard drive storage.
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That's good enough for hundreds of thousands of pictures and music files, or several hundred hours of HD video. Unlike with a regular NAS, Promise doesn't specify what processor and operating system the device is running, and for most users it's not relevant anyway since it doesn't feature transcoding or media services that would tax other NAS's processors. You're buying an alternative to an online service in a box, with a one-time purchase price instead of a monthly fee. The Apollo comes with a two-year warranty. Setup Setting up the Apollo is not difficult. You'll need to connect the device to your router using the included Ethernet cable, plug it in to power, download the Apollo Cloud app (available for Android, iOS, OS X, and Windows), create an account in the app, use the app to search for the new Apollo on your local network, and then link the two. Then you can start using the app to configure the device and add any users in your family groups (more on that below).
You can't access the storage via a Web browser, unlike with many NAS and personal cloud devices, so the Apollo is of no use to Chrome OS and Linux users. Once set up, primary access to the storage is via the app, aside from a sync folder you can set up on your laptop or desktop. All files copied or moved to the sync folder will be backed up on the Apollo. Note that I didn't call that folder a share point. You won't find traditional shared folders, backup scheduling, virtual machines, or media services like iTunes or Plex on the Apollo. It's been simplified to remove all the networking voodoo from the equation.
While that makes it simpler to set up and to administer, it also means that you won't be using the Apollo as a home base for your Torrent downloads, as a central repository for your commercial movie and video collection, or as central storage space for backing up all your family's laptops. For those tasks, you'll need a more powerful (and complex) NAS like the My Cloud Mirror or the. Rather, the Apollo is primarily intended for backing up all the photos and videos you take with your phone and give you an easy way to share them from centralized storage back at home. The Apollo's settings screens are stripped to the max: You can add family members and link them together in groups, and administer a set of shared folders on the Apollo itself. But there's no way to activate or change the esoteric sharing (like granting read or write access to individual levels of nested folders), media services, or PC backup or recovery settings that a more general-use NAS would have.
For simplicity's sake, that's by design. Send and Share To share your photos and videos from the shared drive, you can either email a link direct from the Apollo Cloud app or use the share button on your phone. It works like the native share function on your smartphone: tap a photo or other file, then choose any social media app you have installed (such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter). The app will then take care of posting the photo to your timeline. If you choose to email a link, the recipient will be able to click the link to access that photo or video file directly from the email client or Web browser on their phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. You can share all of your uploaded individual pictures, files, and videos with up to 10 users, who can be linked in groups. So, for example, your laptop files like financial documents can stay private between you and your spouse, but your uploaded pictures will be seen by everyone, including your children and your parents.