Crackerwax

The Goblin King. Put it away.

I love the principle of cloud storage, that I can save something on my Mac and as if by magic a super clever little daemon whisks away all that data to the, er, well, faery data land. There to be kept safe by the Goblin King and his massive package.

Alas I also have concerns about said faery data land, who’s looking at it? Do I trust them? Will they do me a mischief? Will they sell my data to the papers? I sometimes think about this a lot.

Then I normally remember that Google could have outed me as any number of things a long time ago and settle down to worry about proper stuff, like will the Deadwood TV movies ever get made, will I ever finish The Shield, what’s for dinner and why is George Lucas such a twat, safe in the knowledge that Dropbox is fab.

So this Dropbox then, yes, it’s one of these storage services that allows to chuck all your stuff into the cloud but the difference here is that they’ve got some nifty software to back their service up (excuse the pun).

Not only can you view your data on any web browser and any OS, but you can also get clients for your smartphone – iOS and Android only at the minute, though BlackBerry is coming – and best of all, a tiny little application that runs as a service on your Mac or your Windows box.

This little application is the truly killer bit. It just sits there synchronising the folder of your choice, so that the data sits on your disk and in the cloud simultaneously. No clumsy dragging and dropping, or copying files. No way jose. Dropbox does it all for you, save it in your Dropbox folder and forget about it.

Overnight – well, quicker than that but I’m all about the romantic image – the Dropbox daemon will pop into your computer and create tiny little clones of your data. Awesome!

Of course that’s not all. The mobile apps let you access all your data when you’re out and about and the Dropbox website will let you do the same. I can’t get over how so fantastically well thought out it all is. Dropbox really does deserve your attention.

They give you 2GB storage for free and if your prepared to pay a tiny amount per month you can get 50GB or even 100GB accounts.

The question is though, why isn’t iDisk this cool? Come on Apple, why?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2010 at 7:55 am and is filed under Geeky Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.