I’m experimenting now with a new system called Drop Box, which synchronizes data between multiple computers and stores the information, with all revisions, on Amazon S3 servers. No pricing has been issued yet, however I have a few 2gb beta test licenses available is anyone needs one. It reminds me of Phanfare on my two Macs, with easy sync of my photos.

The new Mobile Me system has peaked my interest and we’ll see what the Apple folks have planned later this week.

Andrew, thank you for the 2.0 changes and continuing to upgrade Phanfare. I consider it a “must have” on all of my computers.

Carbonite also does a decent job, but there are two things I like better about Mozy. 1) Mozy supports external hard drives and Carbonite does not (as of this writing). 2) Mozy works better for restoring individual files or directories, to my mind.

Oh yeah – important since you have a Mac – Mozy has a Mac client. Important since you said you are running a Mac. (I have a Mac and a PC and Mozy works on both my rigs.)

Bear in mind, neither Mozy nor Carbonite are meant to online storage in the sense that you have easy access to your files online nor are they meant for online sharing. They really are meant more for backup/restore.

Good luck.

I gave JungleDisk a try. I haven’t used it since they released that new software update, though. My only real impression (aside from that the software was a little confusing at first… which is supposed to be remedied) is that backing up my files took a LONG time. I mean… I expected it, but it was still frustrating.

I think the key to cloud computing is the illusion of locality. I remember you writing about how the beauty of the Phanfare desktop clients was the way that the photos and videos “feel” local even though they are stored on your servers. I agree that’s a great part and it’s so nice not to have to worry about whether or not I have a file on my computer or not. I recently even gave the integrated Picnik editing a try and was really impressed. It was a snap. I clicked “edit in picnik”, the photo showed up there and when I was done editing, it took me back to Phanfare and I could see the edited file there.

I think one limitation, however, is that there are still quite a few things which cannot be done to the file after it has already been uploaded to Phanfare. For example, I can’t change the filename. If I wanted to do something as simple as change the filename I have to download the file, change it on my desktop, and re-upload it. That seems like a rather inefficient use of bandwidth. Another example is if I wanted to add IPTC metadata to a file. Again, I would need to download in, change it and re-upload it. In both this case and the case of re-naming the file, only a few bytes or kilobytes are being changed, but the whole file has to be downloaded and uploaded.

My point is that I’d like to upload once and only once. As it is, I’m realizing that if I want my image descriptions to travel with the file wherever they go (as in if I ever left Phanfare… or if I simply wanted to share a file on another photo-sharing site), I’d have to add the description to the IPTC data before uploading. What if Phanfare could simply write that metadata into my file for me whenever I add a description to a photo within Phanfare? What if I had the ability to rename my meaningless image filenames to something significant like its date from within Phanfare? Sorry for harping on this theme!