JC - Technology and Stuff

There are just too many ways and places to store your files online nowadays. I must say I find it a little confusing and overwhelming at times. Which service should I use? Should I even use a service at all? Aaarrrgggghhhh! It just makes me want to scream. Ok, let’s rewind a little.

It wasn’t more than a few years ago when the only option was to keep all your letters, spreadsheets and other documents firmly planted on your home PC. Still that didn’t really matter as you only had one after all. Times have changed and like the multi-car family there are many of us that are now multi-PC families too. Furthermore, we need access (well ‘need’ is a little subjective - but we all swear we ‘need’ that access) to our PCs wherever we go as well. Hmmm. Now there’s the beginning of the problem. How do we have access to all our ’stuff’ whevever we are? It’s a bit like when the car industry started putting CD playes into our cars. Suddenly we had to choose where we were going to use our only copy of the ‘Best of Queen’. Do we leave it at home to play on the stereo unit downstairs? Do we take it upstairs and leave it next to the bed for early morning relaxation? Or do we put it in the car to play at full volume as we drive down the street with the windows wound down? Whatever we chose, the CD was never in the right place when we actually wanted it. So what did we do? Well we either bought a second copy or ‘burned’ our own second copy and used the copy in the car. Later we discovered we could burn compilation CDs and play them too, but that’s another story!

Like the CD copies, all of us started keeping multiple versions of important files on different PCs and even on memory sticks so that we always had the file when we needed it. The problem was that unlike CDs which you can’t alter, files are easily modifiable and very soon we didn’t know which of our devices had the most up to date version of the file. Sure, we meant to always keep the latest one on the memory stick, but didn’t we make a last minute alteration to the version at work last week? Hmmm. Can’t quite seem to remember!

So that brings us to online storage, a wonderful notion of keeping a single copy of a file somewhere in the cloud of the Internet that we can access anytime and is always the latest version (except of course those times when we actually need the file and we’re not online). Like CD players, I’ve tried many different online document storage sites over the past few years as I have struggled to play the ‘where’s the latest version’ game. For the most part they sort of work. And it’s not that they don’t technically work it’s just that like I previously alluded to I always seem to want a file when I’m not online somewhere (and for that I still carry around my memory stick!). Anyway, of all the sites that are available I have two favorites that I continue to use for different reasons, Zoho and Mesh.

Zoho has been around for a couple of years now and has incrementally increased its offerings and maturity along the way. The latest addition this week has been Zoho Docs, a file structure type wrapper that allows all sorts of files to be organized into folders. Zoho is fundamentally different than a lot of other online storage sites as its main purpose is to be an online version of sorts of Microsoft Office. That means it has a spreadsheet offering, a word processing offering, a presentation offering, a notebook offering and many more things besides. All in all it’s a very comprehensive and capable site. If you are the sort of person that wants to write letters, create spreadsheets, use presentations, etc and need access wherever you’re online then this is definitely the product for you. It’s all out more powerful than Google Docs and how they do it for the money (ie FREE) I just don’t know.

Mesh on the other hand (which I’ve blogged about before) is a slightly different tool. Mesh is intended to synchronize files that you keep on one PC with a place in the Internet cloud. It also synchronize with other PCs if you like and can directly synchronize files from one PC to another via its services. Mesh is not intended as a spreadsheet or document editing tool, it supposes that you use software like Microsoft Office for that. Like Zoho, Mesh is also free and provides pretty much unlimited storage to the user.

Online file storage and synchronization has matured quicker than CDs in cars. I still have to keep extra copies of CDs. My car is also not connected to the Internet and so I can’t stream music to it from any central storage. Why? Come on car people - make it happen (oh but that’s another topic).

So if you haven’t taken the plunge yet but have thought about online storage, file access, or synchronization and backups, I definitely recommend Zoho and Mesh. It beats working out where you left your ‘Best of Queen’ CD!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under PC Tool, Technology, Thoughts. 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.