time
Storage? I am Storage!
As a consequence of my misery with Microsoft's blighted Offline Files, I've greatly accelerated my research into online storage and using 'The Cloud' to synchronize geographically divergent devices, eg. laptops and phones.
Purist cloud is, IMO, stupid and impractical. It all comes down to using some form of local caching at different levels to overcome the practical limitations of connectivity.
My idea is, very loosely, to publish a workgroup's document folders to the cloud and subscribe laptops and phones to specific folders to allow 2-way/multi-way synchronization. So in my view of the world, there should always be at least two complete copies, the workgroup server and the cloud, with cached copies on other devices as appropriate.
So far, I've looked at about 20 products from companies that really should have stuck to selling snake oil. I pulled the trigger on one called "ZumoDrive". To test it, I linked a desktop folder of photos to the cloud, then accessed it from the ZumoDrive app I installed on my Android phone.
Upload was slow (50KB/s, possibly due to the cloud being in the US and me in Oz), but I was able to both browse thumbnails of the photos and then step through them on the phone. Cool so far. Except. One of the 12 photos didn't finish loading; in its place the phone displayed an animated 'wait' icon.
Same result when I used a browser to check the cloud. Trouble is, ZumoDrive at both ends assured me that everything was okay.
Anyway, I left it overnight and poked around with it this morning, but couldn't change the state of affairs, so I unlinked the original folder and relinked it, thinking that this would trigger a resync.
Imagine my horror as I watched my photos blink out of existence, one at a time ...
I managed to stop it after just 5. Later, I discovered them in the Recycled Bin, so it was an explicit Delete operation, not vastly accelerated bit rot. Needless to say, I've uninstalled ZumoDrive.
Would other people care to reveal their experiences?
Purist cloud is, IMO, stupid and impractical. It all comes down to using some form of local caching at different levels to overcome the practical limitations of connectivity.
My idea is, very loosely, to publish a workgroup's document folders to the cloud and subscribe laptops and phones to specific folders to allow 2-way/multi-way synchronization. So in my view of the world, there should always be at least two complete copies, the workgroup server and the cloud, with cached copies on other devices as appropriate.
So far, I've looked at about 20 products from companies that really should have stuck to selling snake oil. I pulled the trigger on one called "ZumoDrive". To test it, I linked a desktop folder of photos to the cloud, then accessed it from the ZumoDrive app I installed on my Android phone.
Upload was slow (50KB/s, possibly due to the cloud being in the US and me in Oz), but I was able to both browse thumbnails of the photos and then step through them on the phone. Cool so far. Except. One of the 12 photos didn't finish loading; in its place the phone displayed an animated 'wait' icon.
Same result when I used a browser to check the cloud. Trouble is, ZumoDrive at both ends assured me that everything was okay.
Imagine my horror as I watched my photos blink out of existence, one at a time ...
I managed to stop it after just 5. Later, I discovered them in the Recycled Bin, so it was an explicit Delete operation, not vastly accelerated bit rot. Needless to say, I've uninstalled ZumoDrive.
Would other people care to reveal their experiences?