Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Reliable Unlimited Cheap Online Storage and Syncing Solution

So i've spend some time in the last weeks and months trying to find THE BEST solution for my problem. I have ~500GB of data that need a good damn Reliable, Unlimited Cheap Online Storage and Syncing Solution. Specifying:

  • Reasonable price: ~ 100U$/year maximum

  • Unlimited storage / bandwidth

  • Accepts any file sizes

  • Makes Backup of all my files (with versioning)

  • Syncs to multiple machines

  • Syncs external drives

  • Syncs just specific folders in each computer

  • Has shared folders (file-sharing with coworkers and friends)

  • Shares specific files via URL

  • Win, Mac and Linux client

  • Web access to download/upload files


I've searched many options, including the populars:

And none of them have at least a big part of my needs. Here is the incomplete research template i did (on google spreadsheet). I intended to finish this list but since there wasn't a perfect choice, i stopped wasting my time on this.

The big issue is that:

  • The 'Pay by GB' Solutions (amazon/rackspace) are too expensive for 100GB+

  • The 'Unlimited Backup' Solutions don't sync (Mozy etc)

  • The 'Syncing' Solutions (Dropbox etc) don't really backup (they sync) and none has unlimited storage


So i decided to wait and keep:

  • My Work Documents: Dropbox (a free 2GB account) - which nicely syncs my computers

  • My Photos & Collages: Flickr - its unlimited storage, so i still need to upload my older photos

  • My Videos: Youtube & Vimeo

  • And on the External Harddrive: 100GB of Music and 200GB of Videos (documentaries/movies) - this NEEDS some online backup....


Totally related to this, see Dan Ariely's presentation (youtube) on this year's TED, around 11min he talks about our problem dealing with choices...

3 comments:

  1. I really like Dropbox for sync work related documents. It is very simple and reliable enough.

    With the another options I totally agree with your choices, there is not better solutions by now.

    Like you I have a similar problem with my music. And I suppose that a solution for that will take a while specially because store mp3 that possibly breaks some copyrights will be a big issue for any service provider.

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  2. Yep, MP3 & Videos are really the big problem: mainly for storage size (videos mostly) and the damn copyright issues...

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  3. If 2GB isn't enough for your work documents, you should look into Microsoft's Office Live Workspace which will give you 5GB of storage space for free. It can be plugged into MS Office 2003 or 2007 making it really easy to save your files for anytime, anywhere access.

    Cheers Iuri,
    Jeff
    MSFT Office Live Outreach
    http://workspace.officelive.com/

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