Review of 7 Cloud Storage Services

[wraith808]

Considering I just did a review of SugarSync vs. Dropbox, I thought this review on Tom's very timely-

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/cloud-storage-service-computing,review-1539.html

There's actually no overlap with my review, as the author reviews:

• Box.net
• Carbonite
• Google
• i365 EVault SaaS
• MediaFire Pro
• Microsoft Live Mesh
• Microsoft SkyDrive

For the short synopsis, it appears that they don't really favor any above the other.  I tried mesh for my purposes, but it's not accessible from work which immediately voided that option for me.

[40hz]

@wraith808 - I personally felt your review of SugarSync and DropBox was much better written and researched than the Tom's article.

I also had to laugh at parts of Tom's so-called conclusion:

For today, we suspect that using two or three cloud storage services for different parts of your life is the way to go. Just in this office alone, we use Docs, Mesh, SkyDrive, MobileMe, and Mozy.

A mix of three different services is the way to go? Are they insane? Or are they just so "geeky" that they might as well be?

The whole point is to simplify things, not make them more complicated than they already are.

And talk about being careful not to offend. Why not say: "None of these services are fully ready to replace your current in-house storage or backup system." and be done with it?

Maybe it's because:

As you can probably tell, we’re big Google fans.

Well...yeah. You think? 

I'm disappointed with Tom's Guide. I know from experience they're capable of doing a much better job than this 'review.'

[Dormouse]

And how can they possibly say what they say about Carbonite without concluding that it should be avoided? And how can they say that they didn't bother looking at Mozy because it was just like Carbonite?

Pretty random selection of services too.

[JavaJones]

Yeah I was particularly annoyed by the "Mozy is too similar to Carbonite so we didn't include it" bit. I mean why bother comparing if you're not comparing *similar systems with similar purposes*?

That being said, though their conclusive statements are not very comforting or useful, I can see the value in *some* combination of services, just not the *5* that they seem to use in their office. In my case I could see using 2 services, Google Docs or Zoho, and something like DropBox, SugarSync, etc. GDocs is really just of interest for its online doc editing, so it's kind of a different product category altogether. I can see why they included it in this comparison to a point, but it's really a different best, and not a general backup/sync solution. I guess that's where the "focus" element of their table comes in, but all I really get a sense of is that they probably should have done different comparisons for different uses instead of trying to do one article on all these different things and then be pretty much unable to compare them or draw any useful conclusion as a result of how different they are.

- Oshyan

[40hz]

Out of curiosity, has anybody who's tried Microsoft's Mesh found it to be even remotely usable in it's present state of development?

It lasted less than a week on my test setup before I scragged it.

[wraith808]

^ It looked interesting from the interface perspective, but I couldn't get it running because of restrictions at my jobsite.  What were the negatives?

[40hz]

^ On my machine: major boot delays, resource hogging, stability issues, and lockups.

On one of my client's machines: all of the above - plus getting locked out of his account for no apparent reason on two separate occasions. Even Microsoft couldn't explain what happened other than to remind him Live Mesh was still in beta.

(He's since gone over to DropBox.  )

[MrCrispy]

I'm using Mesh for moderate amounts of data (<1gb) but more importantly its remote desktop. That works great! I can easily work from home and also access my home pc from outside. The only problem I have is IE will crash sometimes if I resize the window while using RDP.

I also use Dropbox and it has a much nicer interface as well as file history in the website.

[Deozaan]

SpiderOak is pretty good. It's a bit more complicated than Dropbox, but it also has many more features.

[Ampa]

It strikes me that one major failing of all these Cloud storage systems (for the average home user) is the painfully slow upload speed on ADSL connections.

Backing up 2GB of data at <32kb/s is no fun at all.

I guess in the future upload speeds will rise, but for now I will stick to USB Flash, CD/DVDs and external HDs.

[tomos]

It strikes me that one major failing of all these Cloud storage systems (for the average home user) is the painfully slow upload speed on ADSL connections.

Backing up 2GB of data at <32kb/s is no fun at all.

If you do have better upload speeds you can be limited by the backup site itself
This comparison-test here is a year and a half old now:
The 'winner' - humyo's upload speed was around 350kb/s (if my maths correct)

It would be nice to see a more recent comparison of the basics like the one linked to.