“Could Apple be working on the ‘iCloud Home’ — a Mac mini-based iCloud server for the home and home/small business office — I’ve long wanted?” Dennis Sellers wonders for Apple Daily report. “Perhaps.”
“The company has filed a patent (number 20130311597) with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for ‘locally-backed, cloud-based storage,'” Sellers reports. “Apple notes that a popular service offered by many cloud computing systems is cloud-based storage. To enhance this service, the cloud-based storage can be extended through the use of a local storage device. A local storage device, such as a network enabled external hard drive, can be made available via a user’s Internet connection, per the patent filing.”
“The local storage device can then be used to transparently store the user’s content,” Sellers reports. “That is, the user can still back up their devices to the cloud, but in some cases instead of the content residing in the cloud-based storage, it can reside on the local storage device without additional action required by the user.”
Read more in the full article here.