Underground Media: Reloaded

I am a huge fan of cloud storage ever since I downloaded Dropbox for the first time and realized the power and efficiency of having access to critical files everywhere across all devices.  In addition to storing all of my mobile-phone camera snaps, my wife and I also use it to maintain a shared finance folder for things like tax info, important receipts, etc.  Dropbox is mission critical for me, and it's the first thing I install when I setup a new phone or tablet. Since 2007, when Dropbox was a relative loner in the cloudsync game, many other competitors have sprung up and a few are quite good.  I personally use Evernote , Google Drive, Bitcasa , and Mega .  Why would any human being need five different cloudsync services?  Well, my needs have changed over time and each service has different strengths and weaknesses.  Evernote has great tagging and search features, but it's focus is primarily on note-taking.  Google Drive does OCR and has a documen...

Ladies and Gentlemen, this concludes my experimentation with online data storage. My experience has totally and completely sucked. After spending the better part of two days uploading my music, I find out that JungleDisk doesn't actually do "streaming." When I try to play a song that I have stored remotely, JungleDisk actually connects to the Amazon S3 and *downloads* the complete song and caches it on my local harddrive. Then it plays. My local harddrive's cache size is about 5GB. My entire music collection was maybe 9GB. Let me paint this picture. I uploaded my music collection to JungleDisk/Amazon so I could stream it from anywhere and reclaim some local disk space on my aging laptop. But when I connect to play music, it downloads the entire music collection again! That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! I wanted to *stream* my music on-demand. If I wanted to copy something, then I would copy it. The point is NOT to use my local harddr...

That data backup took an ENTIRE 48 hours to complete! Things are all fine and dandy now that everything is parked remotely, but daaaaaaamn it took a long time. Unless you've got a TON of upload bandwidth (at least 2Mb's) I would pass on the online data storage option. The cart is truly ahead of the horse on this one...

Recently, I decided to give JungleDisk (powered by Amazon's S3 service) a test-drive. JungleDisk provides a toolkit for online data storage. Basically, I can store a bunch of stuff (music, docs, videos, etc.) remotely on Amazon's servers instead of my own local harddrives. The benefits include safe and super-reliable access to my data from wherever I am, at any time. I was thinking what a cool idea it would be to store all my music there , so I could stream it from any computer. In fact, I think storing things like pictures and music on local harddrives is a total waste. For the most part, this media just sits around on a harddrive doing nothing. Perhaps you occasionally search it for that wedding photo your mom wants to see. And then, at some point, the harddrive fails for some reason or another. Then you're really screwed. Online data solutions, on the other hand, have backups for their backups. And streaming pics or music is just fine for me. As long as i...

I'm a pretty cheap date. Nachos and merlot, or some slick internet services that support linux, and I'm yours. Google kicked things off a couple of years ago with stuff like Google Earth and Picasa, all of which are cross-platform and run precisely as intended on my linux PC's. Google's online offerings like GMail, Google Chat, Google Docs, and YouTube are also deliciously O/S agnostic. In the span of about a year, linux users like me went from the back to the internet bus to the comfy "old people" seats up front! Just when we thought it couldn't get any better, Amazon drops in out of nowhere with a linux-supported MP3 store . And even better, it's DRM-free! Crazy, right? Now I can cozy right up next to iPod-owners so they can truly savor my cheaper, higher-quality, DRM-free MP3's from Amazon, on my cheaper, higher-quality no-name MP3 player . And the Amazon just keeps on giving! Although I'm late to this party (hey, if it's new to ...