The Back Alley Archives

I've been messing around with a couple of services lately, mainly Google Drive and Microsoft's Skydrive. I like having both optione s and have used them to back up some documents I need access to whenever.

Skydrive seems a little limited. I used to back up some documents and pictures and that's about it. Google Drive is pretty slick, especially if you use Chrome as your browser. It lets me back up pictures and documents. Then, I had some videos on my cell phone that I was able to convert to avi or mp4 formats on my laptop and upload to Drive. After Drive processes the files in those formats, you can click on the file in Chrome and it opens up in a new tab and can be played like a youtube embedded video. Only thing I couldn't figure out is how to maintain the sound on the video when I convert the format from the phone file.

With both services, you can also share stuff out with other people. Pretty cool.

Haven't tried "Skydrive" but I do use Google Drive for both work and personal stuff. I dig it. Also, Amazon lets you host all of your music in the Cloud, and I've used services like Dropbox in the past as well.

I gotta admit, I still keep local backups of all my important stuff - I'm still not trusting of putting my data in the hands of anyone but me. But it sure is convenient to be able to access everything no matter where I am.

I think I've decided the sharing and security settings for Google Drive are a lot better than SkyDrive's. You get more flexibility.

Dropbox is it. Been thinking about an Cloud backup service though.