Thank you to Connected Data and Drobo, maker of the Transporter, for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. Last year, the company sent me a review unit of the original Transporter, the one that has a cone shape, so that I could check it out for iPhone J.D. I continue to use it every single day in my law practice and I recommend it to other attorneys all the time. Last month, the company sent me a review unit of the new Transporter Sync so that I could try it out for a few weeks and tell iPhone J.D. readers about it. It is a great product for any attorney who wants secure cloud storage for files. [UPDATE 8/12/2014: Click here for my more recent post on the Transporter.]
Let me start by talking about what you can do with both the original Transporter and the Transporter Sync. Both products let you put your files on a drive that is available online 24/7 so that you can access your files from your work and home computers (either PC or Mac) and from an iPhone and an iPad. You technically have two copies of every file that is on a Transporter — the copy on the Transporter's hard drive, and a local copy saved on your computer's hard drive. The advantage of working this way is that when you want to use the file, you can do so quickly with the local copy without waiting to get the file over your network. But as you edit the file, the new version is sent to your Transporter's own hard drive, and is then synced to any other computers set up to work with your Transporter.
Because Transporters have large hard drives, you can also use them to add extra virtual storage to your iPhone and iPad. For example, you can have many thousands of documents on a 1 TB Transporter — a device far larger than an iPhone or an iPad which don't come in sizes larger than 128 GB — and then you can use the Transporter app to access any specific files when you need them on your iPhone and iPad (as long as you have a network connection on your iPhone or iPad).
Everything I've described above you can also do with Dropbox and other cloud storage services, but Transporters also offer some unique advantages that make them particularly attractive for lawyers.
First, your documents are stored on a hard drive that you control and which sits in your office (or house or wherever you put it). Thus, you don't have to worry about whether some third party is maintaining the security of your documents. For most attorneys, this is the key feature of the Transporter that matters the most. Your files are always available to you, wherever you are, but the files are securely encrypted on a hard drive that remains solely in your possession, so you can feel comfortable putting confidential attorney-client communications on it. Nobody else can access your Transporter without your permission. On the other hand, if you do want to give someone, such as a client, access to lots of documents, photographs, videos, etc. you can simply place them in a Transporter folder and then give only that specific person, or a specific group designated by you, access to that folder.
Speaking of the Transporter being in your possession, I should note that the light that surrounds the Transporter is actually a handy status indicator ring, which makes it easy to keep an eye on things. It is typically blue in the front and green in the back, but the lights change color to tell you if something out of the ordinary is going on. Here is what the color codes mean. For example, if you run out of disk space, the light turns solid red. If you lose an Internet connection, either because of a problem with your provider or if you accidentally unplug the Ethernet cord, the light flashes from red to yellow, back and forth. The lights make it very easy to keep on eye on the Transporters to make sure that everything is okay.
Second, Transporters offer the special Transporter Library. If you don't want a file to take up space on your computer's hard drive, simply put the fie in the Transporter Library folder. Anything that you put in this folder is not also stored on your computer. For example, you may have a large video file that is taking up too much space on your computer's internal hard drive, so you can move it to the Transporter Library. Once there, you can still access it on your computer, but it just takes a tiny bit longer to load because you are getting the file from the network.
Third, Transporters also offer a Selective Sync function so that you can control which folders are synced to your computer. For example, you might decide to keep local copies of all of your Transporter documents on the computer in your office, but you might select only a few of your most important folders to sync to the smaller (but faster) SSD drive on your MacBook Air or other laptop computer.
Fourth, Transporters give you a lot of storage space for a fraction of the cost of other services. When you use Dropbox, the first 2 GB is free, but you have to pay $100 a year for 100 GB, $200 a year for 200 GB or $500 a year for 500 GB. You can get the original Transporter for $200 for 500 GB, $249 for 1 TB or $349 for 2 TB. And that is a one-time price. There is no yearly fee.
This is where the new Transporter Sync offers some unique advantages. The Transporter Sync looks like the original Transporter with the top of the cone cut off. And that is exactly what is going on because the top of the cone in the original Transporter contains the hard drive, but the Transporter Sync does not contain a hard drive.
You pay $100 for the Transporter Sync and then attach any USB drive that you want to it. So if you already have an extra USB drive to use — note that the drive will be erased when it is formatted to use with the Transporter Sync — then you can get all of the advantages of a Transporter for only $99. If you don't already have an extra hard drive, you can buy 1 TB hard drives for well under $100 on Amazon, so instead of spending $200 for a Transporter with built-in 500 GB, you can spend under $200 for a Transporter Sync plus an external USB 1 TB hard drive. You can use any USB 2.0 or 3.0 drive with the Transporter Sync. For example, for my tests, the Transporter folks sent me a Touro Mobile Pro 1 TB hard drive which you can buy on Amazon for $74.95. If you need more space, you can currently get 2 TB drives on Amazon for under $150 and 4 TB drives on Amazon for under $200.
In my tests, I have seen no performance differences between using the original Transporter with a built-in hard drive and a Transporter Sync with an external hard drive. The original Transporter offers the advantage of aesthetics — I think it looks better to have a single device on your desk versus both a device and a hard drive with a cord between them — plus it takes up less space to not have to deal with an external drive. But as noted above, a Transporter Sync can be cheaper, and you have the advantage of choosing whatever size and type of hard drive that you want to use. And if you ever need to change a hard drive (such as if it crashes), my understanding is that you can open up the original Transporter and replace the drive, but I suspect that it is easier to simply plug in a new USB hard drive to a Transporter Sync.
Speaking of drives crashing, remember that all hard drives die eventually. Some do so in a few months, others last for many years, but they are all ticking time bombs — and unfortunately, you can't see the countdown timer, so you don't know how much longer you have. That is why it is essential to backup your data. Transporter makes this easy to do.
First, as noted above, files on your Transporter are also stored on your computer's hard drive (except, as noted above, for files in the Transporter Library and files in folder that you are not syncing to that specific computer using the Selective Sync function). And if you sync both your home and your work computer to your Transporter, then you have two backups or every file on your Transporter.
Second, you can purchase an additional Transporter or Transporter Sync to use it as a backup drive. The process of doing so is incredibly simple. If you already have one Transporter, wen you first connect your second Transporter it asks for your existing username and password. Then the default is for the new Transporter to serve as a backup of everything on your original Transporter. When files are changed on your first Transporter, the are quickly (and invisibly to you) also changed on your second Transporter. The means that you can use a second Transporter for off-site storage. For example, you might put an original Transporter in your office, and then you might put a Transporter Sync with an external hard drive in your home. That way, if there is a disaster at your office such as a fire and both your computer and your original Transporter in your office are destroyed, you still have all of your files securely stored on that Transporter Sync at your house.
Transporter is a great sponsor for iPhone J.D. because the Transporter and Transporter Sync are incredibly useful accessories for any lawyer, and they are especially useful any lawyer who uses an iPhone or iPad. You have constant, secure access to your files from any of your devices, while at the same time you can rest assured that your confidential documents remain under your control.
Click here to get a Transporter or Transporter Sync from the manufacturer.
