So, I’m looking at a couple web based storage services. Actually, I’ve been looking at quite a few. But only two seem to be useful to me.
The first is DropBox which is available from getdropbox.com. It installs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux based computers.
What it does
What DropBox does is create a directory called “My DropBox” on your computer. You can decide where to put this special folder, but you can’t change the name of it yet.
Any file you place into this folder will instantly be uploaded to your storage space on DropBox’es servers. It will also be instantly download to every other computer you have that is running DropBox.
It keeps the folder in sync between all your computers, and provides you with an online web site where you can access the files from there. That way if you’re at a friends place, you can connect to the site and grab the one or two files you need.
Sharing Files
There is also a special public folder on the web site. You can put files in there simply by placing them in the Public folder on your computer (under My DropBox of course). Then you can pass out a special HTTP URL to friends to download the file themselves.
In addition to a public folder, you can share a folder with other DropBox users. The only catch is the shared folder subtracts from everyone’s space equally. DropBox does this to help account for bandwidth costs.
Storage and Transfer
DropBox uses binary deltas to update the files on the web storage. So if you have a 500MB file and only change a few pieces of it, only those pieces will be transmitted again. This saves greatly on bandwidth. You could create a 500MB TrueCrypt folder and then update it normally and only the binary changes would be sent.
DropBox claims that all storage is encrypted on their servers, but they do hold the keys to that encryption. They could decrypt it if DHS threatened them. That’s what the TrueCrypt file is for 🙂
Pricing
Pricing is good and bad. The good part is the first 2GB of space is FREE 🙂 If you’re only keeping your documents and stuff there, you will probably never need more. Pictures, MP3’s, and Videos would take a lot more space. Can’t see why I’d use DropBox for those though.
Next option is 50GB for $10/month. Can’t find the $99/year option for that anymore. Next size increase is 100GB of space.
But if you’re smart and have many computers with different needs, you can setup free 2GB DropBox accounts for each one (assuming you have multiple email addresses). Then just share the folders you want between them. Gmail accounts are good for this because you can tack on “+tagname” to your address and basically get different email addresses under your one account.
Other Products
The best competitor to DropBox is SugarSync. They have some better pricing options, but their sync response is quite a bit slower. They also do not do delta copies.
The next web storage review will be on JungleDisk. It’s designed to work as a drive letter on your computer that stores data in the web cloud. They also provide a backup tool that backs up your files to this drive on a scheduled basis. It costs $0.15 per GB of storage that you use. I haven’t signed up yet, but will talk about it later when I have had a chance to play with it.