OMG, I finally went and did it. I never considered I would and I never thought I would have to “fess up” in public, but now that time has come. It’s that Tiger Woods moment. Deep breath. I have given up on Dropbox and signed up with SugarSync. There, I have come clean. It was a massive decision as I have been with Dropbox for ages and have been happy with what the service provided but the decision to jump ship and link up with Sugarsync was relatively easy. Hell, I know us geeks are fickle types, ready to cast steady relationships into the cauldron at the flick of a slick bit of coding, but even the speed of this switch took me by surprise.
It look less than a week to decide to move all my “stuff” from my paid for 50gb storage option with Dropbox to SugarSync. OK, for the same amount of money SugarSync gives me an extra 10gb of space, but this was never the issue. I came to the conclusion early on in my Dropbox days that I was never going to run out of capacity on my price plan unless I was prepared to incur the wrath of my service provider by uploading my MP3 collection 24/7 over three or four months!
The first twitch of uncertainty came with a press release from SugarSync announcing you could now upload files to your SugarSync account via email. This has been used by the likes of Evernote to secure files from wherever you are and its is a slick and smooth operation that works like clockwork, if I am allowed to use such an analogue phrase in a digital world.
Linking – The Killer Facility
Encouraged by this I looked deeper and found the real function that made me switch – linking. With Dropbox if you want to keep folders and files in sync they had to be within the master Dropbox folder. With SugarSync you can link any folder or file on your PC to your SugarSync Magic Briefcase. Let me give you some examples.
Some of my backup services like Mozbackup or GDocBackup allow you to specify the location of where you want data to be backed up. So it is easy to direct backup data to /my documents/my dropbox/folder. Other services are not so flexible.
Microsoft’s Live Writer, a blogging software which this post is being written with, insists on saving data in its own dedicated folder under My Documents. To get this linked up with Dropbox I had to create a My Blog Posts folder under the master Dropbox folder and then manually drag n drop files from one location to the other. PITA, With SugarSync I can link the My Blog Posts folder to Magic Briefcase and that’s it, all the files are linked to the webside server.
Similarly, a lot of the application data material which contains a lot of formatting information can be backed up with the click of a checkbox. There’s no way that you can drag this lot to the master Dropbox folder and get everything to remain synced!
It’s early days but I like the feeling that SugarSync lets me feel so much more in control and allows my syncing, backup etc to be under my control. I’m sure there’s lots more to get to grips with and I’ll report from the coalface as I discover more.
If you want to try out SugarSync you can either go to www.sugarysnc.com direct or go via this affiliate link or click the SugarSync logo on the right hand side.
Related posts:
- Dropbox Selective Sync Still Not A Patch On SugarSync Linking
- Humble Pie, Cold Beer, Fickleness And the Sugarsync V Dropbox Saga Continues
- SugarSync Ups The Ante Against Dropbox – But Will I Jump Ship?
- Deja Vu And More: Dropbox Takes The Drag Out Of Cloud Storage
- Dropbox Makes All Files And Folders Linkable In New Beta
