Philoking.com

There are some great programs and services for keeping files in sync. Personally I use Dropbox, but I have also used Live Mesh with great success. These services are great for managing a limited amount of files, but what if you need to manage a lot, like my nearly 100GB Lightroom photo collection on my Mac Pro?

I have a 1TB Storage drive and a 1TB backup drive on that machine, but being someone who has lost a lot of photos in my lifetime, I also like to have an off PC backup and an off site backup. How can I accomplish this you ask? Silverkeeper helps me with the first part, Home Server and Cloudberry solve the second part.

I have Silverkeeper, a free Mac based backup utility from LaCie, set up to do two backups daily. The 1st backup copies my library from my storage drive to the backup drive. The second job backs up the hole library from my backup drive to my Home Server’s user folder.

Once the photos are staged there, Cloudberry does the magic of syncing the photos from my home server to Amazon’s S3 service.

I am sure at this point you are thinking, “My God is that overkill.” The sad part is that I have lost so many originals to my favorite photos over the years due to failing disks and simple mismanagement of files, this solution is nearly fool proof.

When Microsoft drops the latest version of Home Server with native OS X backup support, I will probably take the second backup off and do the backup to home server via native means, but for now, this works well.

If you have a Mac, and want to backup files to another location, PC or Mac, this free utility is from a reputable company and definitely worth checking out.

Friday we had a nice lunch in the Office building at the Redmond Microsoft campus and afterwards we checked out some competitive demos. One of the products we were shown was Dropbox. I have been an animated supporter of Windows Live Mesh for quite awhile, but while I loved the functionality, and the freeness, it had some shortcomings that had started to become quite a bear.

My first gripe was that the Mac client was pretty unreliable, and lacked some of the features of the full client, such as Remote Desktop support.

In addition to that there were some general reliability problems with the PC client and a couple “would be nice to haves” that I missed.

After getting a nice demo of Dropbox and checking it out later, I realized that it did alot of what I was looking for. When I looked at the iPhone Application I was sold. I set up the free 2GB account and started tinkering.

I set it up on all of my Mac and PC machines, moved over all the files I traditionally managed with Mesh and started testing.

Impressions

Once the client is installed, Dropbox shows up as a set of folders right in your My Documents folder on a PC or inside your user folder on a Macintosh.

You can copy files in and out of that folder and the folder structure beneath it at will and all the machines you use will stay in check. You can also choose an alternate location upon installation.

The folder management on Mesh is a bear, I imagine taking a very simplified approach such as this would have reaped significant usability benefits. I will say however that allowing me to choose any folder to be shared with Mesh made keeping blogs drafts and wallpapers in sync quite easily. I’ll take that tradeoff though.

I should also mention that the web interface for Dropbox is considerably more functional and clean than the “Windows Desktop” metaphor Mesh uses.

The ability just move files quickly to a public location and get a direct link to them is invaluable. I am always needing to give someone a photo, a document or some other collection of files. This keeps me from dealing with mailbox limits, mail transport headaches or anything like that. I say share, copy a link, and paste it into IM or email it.

With the client application for iPhone I can take photos that are immediately stored on my PC, I can organize files and even view Office documents right on the phone. I tried that earlier with an Excel document and was amazed. After verifying this is the file I want, I can quickly send an email to a contact with a link to the file in question.

Ironically, the screenshot you see to the left was taken on the iPhone and inserted into this blog right from my Dropbox folder, that’s some pretty nice integration!

Price

I realized that this service will be very valuable, so I upgraded to the Pro 50 account. For $9.99/mo. I get 50GB of storage for my synced files. When you travel as much as me and share between so many different machines on different operating systems, this type of service is invaluable.

They also offer a Pro 100 account with 100GB of storage for $19.99 per month.

Final Thoughts

What makes this so different from Mesh to me? For starters, versioning. I can get back to any previous iteration of a file I have saved in the last 30 days. For a $3.99 surcharge you can have unlimited versioning.

The other major difference is that Dropbox is intended for people who need to share files. I want my files in sync, but I also want to be able to get them to other people in a moment’s notice. The iPhone application gives me the ability to go “here is the file you just asked for” and provide access on the spot.

Christian Zibreg from tgdaily’s latest article would have you believe that hard drives are an endangered species and that Google’s online storage offering that is expected to drop soon will manage to cast the death blow and manage to take down Windows and traditional operating systems at the same time.

Wow, that’s a tall order. Even if we remove the line about taking out operating systems, that is unless Google is secretly working with BIOS manufacturers to make sure they have 100% driver support for all network and wifi cards native to the BIOS so they can install their gOS on a blank computer, we use way too much data and need much faster access to it.

I have a gigabit network at home, and I would not consider storing all of my information on a network share. It eventually gets there, but while I am working on a photoshop file, video, music, etc…I am doing it on my local PC, then I archive it off the PC. This paradigm works great for online storage, but the idea that it could take over as your main storage medium is pretty far fetched for any technology that could work on the internet connections that connect probably 90% of the US.

I think a Google storage service with no limit on storage of file size will be cool, but it’s not going to take out hard drives or operating systems, nah.