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In my last posted I talked about G-Drive and my (great) expectations for this technology from Google. Whist we twiddle our thumbs however, there are some great Data Clouds out there right now which are really worth a look. Currently, I haven’t been able to find a perfect solution to fit all my needs but due to a lot of experimentation, I have found a combination of services which I think work really well.

For my needs, a data cloud should be big (many GBs), it should allow you to share your files easily with others (but also securely), it should be able to be mounted like a drive on your computer, it should have version control, it should allow you to use it like a shared network drive and it should allow you to automatically backup your critical desktop files to it. Additionally, it MUST have a good web interface by which you can access your files at any time (and search through them) and it is an added bonus if it can interact with other online applications and services (like Google Docs, etc).

Unfortunately, I’m yet to find a perfect single data cloud with all these features. I have however found 4 data clouds which work quite harmoniously together and pretty much do everything I have mentioned above. So, without further rambling, here are my:

Top 4 best combined Data Clouds

Drop Box (http://getdropbox.com)
This is, in my personal opinion, the best data cloud service currently available. I have it’s accompanying software installed on every computer I use and I push it onto all my friends and family because it’s just that good.

Drop Box essentially works like a shared drive on Windows. The idea is, you go to getdropbox.com, you download their software (for either Windows or Mac) and you install it. During the install process you can create an account (if you don’t have one) and tell it which folder on your computer you wish to be your “Drop Box”.

Once installed, any file you put in that folder is instantly uploaded online. After this, any changes you make to a file in your Drop Box instantly become versioned online, so you can download a previous version of a file if need be. Better yet, if you work on a couple of different computers, just install the Drop Box app on all of them and you can instantly access all your project files from your Drop Box without needing to email them to yourself or even download them again from a cloud service.

For my money however, Drop Box’s stand out feature is it’s ability to share with other Drop Box users. If you work in a small team on the same files, Drop Box will allow you to share all these files with your team (as if you’re working on a network drive) and runs version control on each of these files. Pretty much taking out any need to do any sort of VPN networking what-so-ever… unless you use your VPN for all the other cool things VPNs are useful for..!

So what are Drop Box’s bad points? Well, I’ve only found it a few times but every now and then it appears that a shared file in Drop Box doesn’t actually transfer over to the other computer like it should. For example, I had a couple of PDFs I put in my drop box for a friend to look at. Because I had shared this folder with this friend, they were able to see the PDFs seconds after I put them in there. However, the PDFs wouldn’t open at their end even though they were fine on my side. I haven’t looked any further into this issue as yet but as Drop Box seems to still be a reasonably new service, I’m assuming this may be just a bug they need to sort out.

So in summary, Drop Box offers 2GB of Cloud Space (for free – more space is available if you pay) which allows you to:

• Share files with other Drop Box users
• Access your files from any computer instantly (which is running the Drop Box app)
• Access your files from anywhere with a web browser
• Version all modifications to your files

Some people may also be inclined to use Drop Box as a backup service. My experience however is that so far, it’s file transfers haven’t been reliable enough to ensure all your files will be backed up as intended. Additionally, with only 2GB to play with (of free space), Drop Box seems far too useful at doing so many other things that it would be a waste to chock up this space with just file archives.

Which brings me to my second data cloud of choice;

IDrive (http://idrive.com)
In the same way that Drop Box is best at allowing you to share and collaborate with files, IDrive is truely best at keep your computer backed up. Like Drop Box, IDrive has a desktop app (for Mac and Windows), which runs in the background and allows you to schedule certain folders to be backed up at intervals of your choosing. IDrive offers users 2GB free for personal usage but will upgrade this space to 12GB if you let them email everyone you know… which seems like a pretty crude marketing trick but as my Hotmail account only had a few people in it, I figured I’d give it a shot.

Unfortunately, backup apps aren’t really “fun”, so there’s not a lot of “cool” features but there are many important ones. These include versioning, scheduled backups, email notification of completed backups, the ability to recover single files by downloading them from the website or restoring complete backups via it’s desktop application and a bandwidth control which limits how much bandwidth you’ll allow IDrive to use (very useful if you’re backing things up and working at the same time).

The downside to IDrive is the “calculating” thing it does. I don’t really know what it is “calculating” exactly (i assuming it’s checking for file modifications) but it seems to take forever to do it which has meant that my automated backups take a long time to actually work. I’ll add more to this post should I ever figure out whether I’ve done something wrong and it’s just missbehaving.

So both of these applications are great if you are happy to install some client side software, but what about sharing files with people who aren’t running this software? This is where my third cloud app comes in:

Box.net (http://box.net)
*** EDIT: Before you read about my take on Box.net, it appears they have changed their service to no longer allow “timeless” free accounts. Instead they have introduced a “trial” period for 14 days. Given this, please continue to read about my thoughts on Box.net and you can then evaluate whether their services will provide everything you need. ***

This is probably one of the best known cloud applications available. It supports WebDav which means you can move files to your box.net account directly from your file explorer (Windows Explorer, Finder, etc) but I’ve found that Windows XP needs a few updates before it will work… (I’ve posted about this before if you want more details do a search). It’s web interface is amougst the best of them and allows you to use a drag and drop Java applet to upload numerous files at once. It also talks to a variety of other web applications (like iPaper, Picnik and Zoho) which is handy for on the fly editing and also has built in versioning.

Where box.net comes into it’s own though is it’s sharing with people who don’t have box.net accounts. It seamlessly allows you email a file or folder to a group of people and also provides private URLs. With only 1GB of free space and a 50MB file size limit, Box.net isn’t without it’s shortcomings. It’s for this reason I’ve been drawn away from it as a primary cloud service for all my files and instead just use it as a secondary service to share things with people.

The ultimate shortcoming of all of these 3 cloud applications though is the amount of space you get to play with. Obviously, all of them offer “more space” if you choose to pay a monthly membership fee, but whilst none of them provided a fully rounded service, this is hard decision to make. Therefore, if you’re after oodles of space for free, then take a look at my final data cloud service:

Microsoft SkyDrive (http://skydrive.live.com)
This is probably one of the most average cloud services. It does however come with a whopping 25GB of free space and all you need to access yours is a Live account (Hotmail account).

Now, before I get started, I should say that despite all the bad things I’m going to say, SkyDrive does give you private URLs to your files (like Box.net) and it’s picture viewer works well. After this though… I find it really hard to say too many other good things about this service. I would have thought Microsoft could have built in a few viewers for their proprietary files (like Docx files, etc) and it would have been nice if they let us see the contents of zip files. These things however aren’t deal breaking features and I can cope without them, however…

My main gripe with this service is that although you get 25GB of free space, it’s really hard to use all of it. If you want to upload multiple files at once, you have to use Internet Explorer. But, don’t go thinking you can just drag and drop your C drive onto the browser and walk away, SkyDrive only allows you to upload a group of files – no folders! This makes it horrible for backing anything up unless you use a third party application that can interact with this service. Gladinet is one of these programs that does interact with SkyDrive and essentially mounts the drive on your PC. Personally though, I found their software a little fickle and wasn’t able to backup my entire My Documents folder despite numerous attempts. It also seemed to be pretty greedy for RAM which is very precious on my Windows machine.

Further more, I only later discovered that after uploading about a third of my My Documents folder, I could only download one file at a time. People in the US, UK and a few other places have been given a new feature which enables them to download entire folders as Zip files, but us Aussies are yet to be granted this privilege.

Finally, the last thing that seemed to be missing from SkyDrive is any type of file searching. If they have built in this feature, Microsoft has done an extremely good job at hiding it because I spent 10 minutes looking for it. With all this space to store so many files, why woudn’t you include a search feature???

Despite all of this though, SkyDrive does have a nice looking interface (very Windows) and seems like the right sort way to present a folder like My Documents in a cloud. I would have loved to have seen a feature in Windows 7 which actually combined SkyDrive with My Documents by syncing them together in the same way that Drop Box does things. And who knows, may this is to come but at this stage i can’t imagine what Microsoft was thinking releasing this technology at this stage. It’s clearly not ready and needs to go back into the workshop until it is.

So on that cheery note, I hope my combination of cloud services has helped you find something that will suit your needs and if you know of anything else that works better than the services listed above, I’d be keen to read about them.