townx

TechCrunch have and article about the large number of startups and other entrants into the online storage space. I've been using Strongspace for a few months now, and it's been great. However, I am starting to run out of room in my 4Gb account, and thought it might be worth having a look through the alternatives.

Of the ones mentioned, I already have a Streamload free account, which gives me 25Gb of storage but only a maximum single file download of 25Mb and total downloads per month of 500Mb. I shared some photos and media files recently, and I hit this barrier within a couple of weeks. I could pay for the obscene amount of space they offer with their basic plan (250Gb, for goodness sake) for $9.95 per month. But the main thing which puts me off is the lack of decent access: what I really want is rsync access over SSH, which is maximally efficient on bandwidth and works on Linux. Streamload doesn't offer this. If it did, I would seriously consider jumping to it.

Omnidrive sounds promising, but there is bugger all information on the website, and you have to sign up for yet another bleeding beta to see it. I'm waiting for my invite. With baited breath. Not really.

Some of the other services offer APIs, but again, I just want somewhere to rsync files to. I don't want to have to write an application to do my backups, or do everything through a web interface, or use FTP (insecure and inefficient), or use some Windows-only desktop application. Rsync is a brilliant, fast tool: why not provide access using this in all of these services? Strongspace seems to be the only one which does. But I'm not keen on the idea of upgrading my Strongspace plan to the next one up for 2Gb extra space (on top of the 4Gb I have) at an extra cost of $6 per month (from $8 to $14). That's too much pain. Strongspace will have to keep competitive with all these newcomers, so hopefully they will up their basic storage before too long, and my dilemma will disappear. Who knows, perhaps we'll all be using an official GDrive by summer.