I’m sitting here, trying to make sense of all the options available to me for sharing and storing my “Stuff” in the cloud, and being an efficient web worker.
I have several dillemas.
I like to carry a 4GB usb drive with me wherever I go with all my relavent docs I’m working on with me. It’s sitting on a truecrypt share, so if I lose it, it’s not a big deal, I can just get another one, and I try to keep the drive backed up frequently.
Lately though with all the file sharing options available to me, I am starting to get dizzy! I have several requirements that I must adhere to in order to pick one (or a few).
My requirements
- Needs to work with multiple users. Can’t change storage options every 6 month, my wife HATES that… :)
- Need to be secure
- Needs to be cheap (4.95/month is reasonable)
- Needs to be simple
- Mobile Access? NO
- Sync Multiple Computer? NO - just have 1 at the moment.
Here’s quick review of the ones I’m investigating. Perhaps writing this
DropBox
Very nice interface, but a little bit kludgy when I tried to share stuff with my dad. I think what happened was I shared with him before all the content was uploaded, then shut off my machine. He when got an empty folder with no content in it. If I could control to make my usb drive my “dropbox” folder so to speak, this option would work great for me if I could use it in somewhere other than c:\my documents\dropbox - say on my portable usb drive. Wish I could designate another folder to be a dropbox.
SugarSync
Initially turned on to this because it had a blackberry client. It syncs my content and makes it available to me in the cloud whenever i need it. But it had 2 problems for me 1) it didn’t allow me to sync directly from the usb drive (which trucrypt mounts as a I:> drive on my windows machine). It instead copied everything to it’s own C:\ drive and THEN uploaded. This may have been my fault, I’ll need to try again. The pros was it had a really nice interface for sharing and uploading pictures on the web. The blackberry client really isn’t much either. It loads and then lets you look through your images. But if you want to view a doc or xls file, it shoots you over to the web browser (in the bb) and then makes you download the file. Plus my BB can’t even read doc or XLS files as it is right now. The picture browser isn’t great either, there is no thumbnail support and you have to manually flip through 100s of pics to fine the one you’re looking for.
Syncplicity
Looked to be similar to sugarsync without a mobile client. Not sure how much they will charge since they’re still in beta, but seems like a decent automated syncing tool. I’m trying it now with my usb thumbdrive, running their windows client in the background.
Mozy
Keeps crashing my machine. I am using a Lenovo T60p, but the tech at my office says these things crash all the time, so probably not a mozy issue, more of a laptop issue — but I can only try what doesn’t crash my laptop. Mozy also doesn’t really allow real time access to your files for working, so it really is an archival service, something that is great to know you’ve stored it, but to actually use it for file editing is not what it’s meant for. Again, if it weren’t for my crappy laptop, I’d seriously consider moving all my archives here since storage is unlimited. I’vet set my father up on this, and that has been working great for him. Honestly, I’m a little jealout :).
Jungledisk/S3
This is most likely going to continue being my permanent storage. I’ve found it to be really reliable, and it “just works” with the jungledisk software. One issue with it though is that I need to setup automated backups with it for it to be simple.. it currently isn’t turned on. I use it for all my photos and important docs. It’s around 30+ GB of stuff now, so that’s at my 4.95 month pricepoint. The depressing thing is that as I add about 20-30 GB of photos each year, it will start costing a lot more than 4.95/month. If I could get Mozy working, I might pay to download all my photos back from S3 and then re-encrypt and re-upload to Mozy, but I’ll need a new laptop for that.
Allocation of Files
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PDF/DOCS - Jungle disk has all my important docs, PDF’S etc, but Google Docs has made me re-think all of this because it can now store PDF docs too.
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Pictures - all on Jungle Disk. My favorites are on flickr. Why not just use flickr as my photo backup solution? It’s a thought, but I prefer to use flickr as a sharing site for my favorites, and my mobile cameraphone uploading. Jungledisk has a true archive of 30+ GB of movie files and photos from about the last 10 years.
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Music - I used to put all my music in the cloud for backup, but my cable company shut down my internet connection when I exceeded about 3 gigs of upload. Plus the Amazon S3 option was getting to be higher priced that my 4.95/month pricepoint. So now I just have my music connection replicated on 2 drives and that should be OK. Albums I’ve purchased can be replaced, pictures of my baby can’t!
Conclusion (for now)
So here’s what I’m thinking. After writing this article, I’ve learned there are 2 types of files that I have. Current and Archive. Current ones are probably that last couple of months- pictures, docs, active stuff I’m working on. For docs, my current stash should be google docs, for pics, my current stash should be jungledisk, and/or syncplicity. As I stop working on these docs, or stop needing instant access to the pictures, I’ll begin to migrate them to tha archive, which would be JungleDisk. They can stay static and just be there forever. I don’t expect to work off of anything in jungledisk, it’s more like an archive that I know is there if I need it.
I’ll keep my important/working docs on my usb thumb drive, and will sync with the cloud using syncplicity & (jungledisk manually) for now. We’ll see how that goes. That allows me to have access to the docs should I forget my usb drive at home, or loose it. Plus it’s automated. Right after I save this doc, it will be transported into the cloud.
I tried to embed a spreadsheet into tumblr, but that was not working well, so you can see my quick analysis of the various services above this post, or see the whole page here
6/14/08 UPDATE: One other concern I thought of later was the whole notion of free services… with google, they could later decide to charge, decide to take down their site, etc… with S3/JungleDisk, I’m a paying customer and the company has some skin in the game to make sure my data isn’t lost. I’m not saying google is going to charge, or going to fail, but it is something to be concerned with.
6/15/08 UPDATE:as I thought about things more, I think I need to also consider the possibility of an internet disaster. If I keep my master backup archives on jungledisk/S3/Google, etc… when the Sh*t hit’s the fan and our our internet is down, or there’s some major catostrophie, am I really protected if I were to put everything that was important in the cloud? We all worry about hurricanes, earthquakes and floods now and that is always the justification for storage in the cloud, but what about the reverse? Those data centers for your data in the cloud are also suseptible to these types of disasters as well. Something to think about… perhaps I’ll add it as a category in my spreadsheet analysis above. I guess the bottom line is to have 1 mirror locally, another at your parent’s house across the country, and a 3rd in the cloud. Keeping them fresh and in sync is the problem then.
2 months ago
