Anker’s MindBase Keeps 48TB of Your Home Footage Off the Cloud

Anker has built a smart home hub whose main selling point is that your footage never leaves your house. MindBase, announced at IFA in Berlin on September 3, is the company's first AI home hub, and it holds up to 48TB of local, expandable storage for camera recordings, household data and family photos. No monthly fee to keep last Tuesday's doorbell clip, and no data center in Virginia sitting on video of your kitchen.

That runs against how the smart home has worked for most of the last decade, and it was the most interesting thing in a lineup of roughly 22 Anker products at the show. It's also the claim worth checking hardest, because Anker is the company that already made this exact promise once and broke it.

What Anker says is in the box

MindBase comes in three named pieces. EasyOmni Link is the connective tissue, pulling in close to 100 Anker devices plus hundreds of Matter-compatible products from other brands, and it runs alongside Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Home Assistant rather than asking you to abandon whichever one you already use. TrueSmart Agent is the brain, an on-device AI engine running on what Anker calls an AI Core compute card, rated at 26 TOPS with an in-house language model. EverSafe Memory is the storage half, which behaves like a NAS and supports natural-language video search, so you ask for the clip of the delivery driver on Sunday afternoon instead of scrubbing a timeline for ten minutes.

Underneath all that, the hub has 64GB of eMMC on board, two drive bays that take 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SATA disks, and support for up to 20 camera channels: 16 wireless, plus four wired through an external PoE switch. Anker says footage from an existing HomeBase S380 can be moved over, which matters if you already own eufy cameras and were dreading starting from zero.

The 48TB figure needs an asterisk. It's the maximum the two bays support, and reaching it means a pair of 24TB drives that cost real money on their own. Anker hasn't said whether MindBase comes with any storage installed.

The agent part is unproven

TrueSmart Agent starts with two jobs, a Security Agent and a NAS Agent, with Energy and Clean agents listed as coming later. Anker CEO Steven Yang framed the goal this way: "We believe the autonomous home needs three things: connection, local intelligence and memory that stays in the home under the family's control."

Hard to argue with the sentence. Companies have been selling a version of it since roughly 2017, and most of the hubs that promised a home which thinks for itself ended up as expensive radios that turn lights on at sunset. Nobody at IFA got to watch this agent run for a week in a real house with kids, a dog and one corner where the Wi-Fi dies. Until someone does, 26 TOPS and a small local model are numbers on a spec sheet.

The part Anker has to answer for

Anker's eufy brand sold cameras on a local-storage promise before. In late 2022, researchers found that eufy cameras marketed as local-only were uploading thumbnails to the cloud, and that live camera streams could be opened in VLC without encryption. Anker disputed the reporting, then admitted in early 2023 that the cameras had not been end-to-end encrypted the way it advertised, apologized and said it would do better. A class action followed.

That history doesn't make MindBase a bad product. It means the central claim needs checking. Anker is asking to be trusted on the precise point where it previously wasn't, and the stakes are higher now, because this box is meant to hold years of footage, household data and family photos instead of a thumbnail. Somebody independent should put a packet capture on one before anybody calls the privacy problem solved.

Who it's for, and what nobody knows yet

The obvious buyer is the person running four or five cameras who is now paying two or three separate monthly fees to keep the recordings, plus the Home Assistant crowd who want local processing and have been stuck bolting it together themselves. If MindBase works as described, it does both jobs with one purchase and no recurring bill.

Some of Anker's other IFA announcements have real numbers attached. The eufy NVR Security System E50 is available now, at $999 to $1,199 for the four-camera configuration and $1,599 to $1,899 for eight. The Video Doorbell S4 is $299.99 in late September. The Window Camera E10 is $69.99 later this year. MindBase has neither a price nor a ship date, and neither does the MindBase Security Kit that bundles the hub with the eufy TrackLight Cam S1, the Video Doorbell S4, a Smart Security Shield and entry and motion sensors. So for now MindBase is a preview.

The idea is the right one, and the subscription creep it targets is real. Anker's job now is to put a price and a date on it, and to keep the local-only promise it broke the first time.