Amazon's Cloud Drive

[heurisdick]

If you have an Amazon account (I'm guessing most do), you now can use this new service and get 5 GB free to store files (music seems to be what it's aimed at) and access them anywhere. Is this the shit, or is there already something better out there?

[Orgazmo]

It's the shit for most people.

There are 2 similar items available off the top of my head, but each different in a key way.

Dropbox is an online storage service that has been available for a long time. It places a folder on your computer (and any other computer/phone/whatever else) and makes sure it's sync'd at all time with all data inside within all devices. In other words, if I drag dogsex.jpg into the folder on my laptop, dogsex.jpg instantly arrives in the folder on my phone.

The con compared to Amazon is that Amazon is geared toward media only instead of all files, meaning they're going to make their service badass and compatible with devices that let you play your music from anywhere (like apps phones). This will be a much slicker integration than dropbox probably.

Subsonic is a file server that is run from your own computer that makes itself and any files accessible from any other computer/phone. I briefly explained this to Shaw in the app thread the other day, but I don't think he followed. The result is the ability to access any music/video on the computer that is running the server software from anywhere that has a web browser just by knowing a user/pass. Moreover, there are apps available for major phone platforms that support the api which means you can stream all movies/music to your mobile very easily.

The drawback here is that your home machine is the server. That means that, if you have shit for internet, your streaming will be shit. Scared folks probably will not like the prospect of their computer being open to the internets too...even if it is secured with a user login prompt. The pro, though, is you don't have to dick with amazon. Just download shit to your computer and it's auto-available. Plus conspiracy-prone folks won't have to worry about anyone peeping on their illegal music/movie collection.

The conclusion is that this is a very good middle-of-the-road solution that is probably the correct way for most people in that it's going to be painfully simple to use and free for a fair amount of data.

[heurisdick]

Originally Posted by Orgazmo

Plus conspiracy-prone folks won't have to worry about anyone peeping on their illegal music/movie collection.

That was another thing I was wondering about. But iTunes already can see it all with their little genius program that pretty much looks at all the music I have, so if they went that route I'm fucked anyway.