Wednesday 18 September 2013

Boxes and drives on the interbutts

I had a Dropbox account quite a while ago, and for whatever reason that it was at the time I never really got into it the way that I have recently. I couldn't tell you what it was that failed to grab me the first time around, but I eventually forgot which e-mail address was attached to the account and abandoned the whole endeavour. I'm back now, and I get it this time. It makes a lot of sense to be signed up.

If your electronic things number to many, the convenience provided by any kind of cloud storage is invaluable. Pads, phones and tablets seem to have a better time with Dropbox though. It runs deep. It's integrated up the wazoo. It feels like every second app I use on a regular basis is ready to give whatever it's up to to the rest of all of the things that I have. This is more than can be said for Google Drive and SkyDrive, which both seem to be totally content with their own extensive self integration.

I also like my Google Drive. I pretty much live there. All of my work, uni and writing files are there. Actually, pretty much everything except for media and code. I generally don't keep media in the cloud and I use bitbucket for code. For everything else, Google Drive more than meets my needs.

I've given up on SkyDrive. That is my official stance for the time being. I was kind of into it for a moment, but its convenience was based entirely on some strait arse situational specificity whose boundaries became frustratingly apparent. I've had a lot of issues with SkyDrive that revolve around browser support and plugins. I'm not sure if this has been resolved, and to be honest I'm past the point where I actually care anymore. I don't feel like I can rely on it, which defeats the purpose of such a service. If you live your entire life inside the Windows box, especially the Windows 8 box, SkyDrive might be a kind of okay option for you, but I'd probably still sign up to one of the other major offerings instead.

I run Google Drive and Dropbox in tandem, along with a couple of other specialist services. I'm very happy with this arrangement, and it works very well for me. I'm not sure I would be truly content in my cloud storage without any of them. That said, I was completely content with SkyDrive and Google Drive at one stage, and it is only now that I can see what I was missing out on. Sign up to all of the things, and figure out what works for you.

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