Box in the sky

CLOUD computing is a current fixation in the technology industry, where the buzzword is used to be describe a computing model that has been available for a very long time. It's a handy name though, since it makes things more tangible for the less technically-orientated. It also makes some neat things possible with mobile devices. As your intrepid nerd-servant I decided to lose some documents in the name of testing out cloud storage services. I've been pleasantly surprised.

Cloud storage is of particular interest to me. I like the idea of having a hard drive that lives on the internet. In theory, this means I won't have to worry about backing it up or keeping it running - its maintenance is the concern of the company providing me with the service. I can keep everything online, access it from anywhere and backup is built in.

Sounds splendiferous so far. However, the first problem most people suggest with the above scenario concerns security. How sure can I be that the company in question will keep my data backed up and safe? If my documents are online, how do I keep them away from prying eyes?

Those are good questions until reality is applied. I'm quite sure that my data will be safer in a big data centre with built-in back up and redundancy systems than it will be on my hard drive at home in a country where it is more likely to be stolen by burglars than a hacker in South America.

Conventional hard drives (as opposed to the new, expensive solid state variety) break down often too.

Yes, if you put things online they might be stolen by hackers, as we learned last month with the attack on Sony's Playstation Network systems. That's a risk I'm willing to take. After all, I email almost every document I create to someone else and that document is probably at a greater risk of being stolen in the emailing process than it is from a secure storage server.

The three cloud storage solutions I have tested are Apple's iDisk, DropBox and SugarSync.

First up was Apple. If you pay for the MobileMe service, then you can access 10GB of online storage in the form of your iDisk. This shows up on your computer as an additional drive so you can copy files to and from it. Once files are on your iDisk you can easily share them with other people by creating secure links to the file that expire after a while. You can also set the iDisk so that your computer keeps local copies of the file too, and these are synchronised whenever MobileMe does its thing.

The iDisk experience was pretty good. I started storing work documents on it, along with things like scans of my passport and ID that could be accessed in an emergency when travelling. I installed the iDisk application on my iPhone and could use that to see all my iDisk files and email them around. Suddenly my iPhone had a much bigger hard drive, living in the sky.

It worked well, but it cost money. And then I discovered DropBox.

DropBox beats iDisk on just about every level. The service is free with 2GB of storage and you can pay for much more. Every time you invite someone to use the service you get more storage added to your account. DropBox also syncs more effectively than iDisk by constantly monitoring files for changes, unlike iDisk that waits for MobileMe to sync.

DropBox also works on Windows, Mac and Linux along with just about any mobile device you can imagine and, like MobileMe, has a web-interface so that you can access your files from any web browser.

Best of all, you can share folders with other Dropbox users. For example, I set up a folder for a website redesign and could drop files in it that are automatically shared with all team members working on the project.

The only real downside with Dropbox is that it forces you to keep everything in a special Dropbox folder on your hard drive that it keeps in sync.

Enter SugarSync. This service is also free, but with 5GB of storage and cheap packages to upgrade. It allows you to select any folders on your computer that it automatically keeps in sync with your computer, and other computers that you specify.

So, for example, if I save a document on my laptop hard drive, it is on my online drive with SugarSync and shows up in the documents folder on my home computer too. I can access it from my phone or tablet with the SugarSync application, or third-party software like Goodreader that supports the service. Nice.

Of course, with any of these services you need to get online to access your files unless you're on a computer that holds an offline store of them. This required a behavioural change - syncing files I wanted to work on before boarding a flight, for example.

Cloud storage is an awesome and viable implementation of cloud computing. The next big step, I reckon, will be for your entire hard drive to move into the cloud.

Connectivity is still a challenge in SA, and this prevents the extended use of these services for things like video files - it's just too expensive. But we're getting there. And for smaller files like documents and pictures, cloud storage is the way to go.

 - Fin24