Spoken Like a Geek
The technology blog of Neil Thompson
The technology blog of Neil Thompson
Zumodrive
There are a number of online storage companies popping up and I have covered Dropbox, Box and Skydrive previously. Now there is a new player, Zumodrive, offering something that sets it apart from the rest.
On the face of it the service is similar to the others: a (small, 2gb) amount of free online storage that you can access from your Windows, Mac or iPhone devices or via a web interface. However, where Zumodrive differs is in how it is presented on the host machine. So on my laptop ZumoDrive appears a a removable storage device on drive z (see below). You can browse through the contents of this drive as you would any other and when you open a file it is streamed from the net. If you want to be able to access a file when you are offline you can set it so that it is available locally.
ZumoDrive touts itself as the ideal solution for Netbooks as it gives what is traditionally a device with a limited amount of disk space and unlimited amount of space. That’s true provided, of course, that you can afford the $80 a month the largest option (500gb) would cost you. Other plans start at $3/mth for 10gb.
If I had any criticism it would be that the web-based file system is all Flash based, rather than Javascript, and I have come across a couple of PCs recently that haven’t had Flash installed making the online system useless. That’s a minor niggle though given the ease of use of the rest of the system. The great thing about the service is that you can use it without having to think about it as it works as any other local drive and that, for me, is its strength.
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