Review: SugarSync
- March 20th, 2008
- Read 1500 times
- 6 Comments
How often has this happened to you? You’re trapped in the trunk of a Lincoln Continental and the emergency trunk release has been snapped off. You have a document on your home PC detailing how to escape from such a situation but all you have is your WinMo or Blackberry phone with you. You do a frantic Google search to no avail, and your captors take you to a cornfield and beat you with a baseball bat. Bummer, huh?
Well, now SugarSync can get you out of those occasionally sticky situations we all find ourselves in occasionally on occasion. The service syncs your desktop to a website and allows you to view and download files on portable devices.
If you’ve used something like iDisk, you’ll understand how this works. Essentially, you download the client software and point it to some of your directories. The sync process is fairly quick, even on a throttled connection. I was able to send the contents of my documents folder to the SugarSync servers with little ado. You can then grab those files anywhere in the world and separate Blackberry and WinMo clients let you pull photos straight into your share folder.
SugarSync
The service costs $50/year for 10GB and $100/yr for 30GB. There is a free 40 day trial available, as well.
Pros
Syncing is fairly seamless and there is little to configure. The service is great if you’re traveling and want to keep a packet of files together on any PC for presentations or just office work.
Cons
No versioning, so the latest version is the latest version. While I’m sure folks could use up 10GB of space in a few minutes, it might be a nice option to offer some version control over time, ensuring that an accidental save doesn’t percolate to all of your sharing computers.
TechCrunch readers — and CG readers — can get 50% off the service if they sign up right now. On the whole, the service is barebones yet surprisingly compelling. Mac and PC support are excellent and, except for some speed issues during uploads, it performed as advertised.
drdrew (Who am I?)
4 months ago
How often has this happened to you?
All the freakin’ time. Why, if I had a nickel…
BTW, just thought you might want to know that your favorite music folder is spelled wrong - there’s no “i” in NSYNC there, prettyboy…
alfie (Who am I?)
4 months ago
Errr, another “Con” is that Orb does this, very well, and for free. I get the backup side of this service, but if it’s mobile access to documents and content you want, ORB should do the trick every time.
Patrick (Who am I?)
4 months ago
SugarSync sure sounds sweet.
Shylock (Who am I?)
4 months ago
SugarSync is pretty slow at the moment (around 20 kbps) and also quite expensive … Humyo (www.humyo.com) offers stronger encryption and costs around 45 € per year for 100 Gb. The upload speed is 4 times as fast as for SugarSync.
clive davies (Who am I?)
3 months ago
Sugarsync has been ’sync-ing’ my 4.3 GB ‘my documents’ folder now for 2 days and 2 nights over a broadband connection - 134 files to go - boy this is SLOWWWWW!
geomom (Who am I?)
1 month ago
I am currently doing the trial. I started with photos/image files. As Clive says above, it has taken me DAYS to just do the initial upload of about 4G of files. DAYS!! I’m actually still not done, SugarSync Manager says I have 4 files pending and it will be done in 45 min. woo. hoo.
Here are some limitation I’ve run into–iPhoto integration between Macs doesn’t work. The SugarSync people actually tell you NOT to sync your iPhoto Library file. Which would be OK except then you have to drill down and carefully select only the folders which contain the actual image files (original and edited) before you sync.
Problem #2–the Blackberry “sync” is not technically a sync. You can’t upload files from an SD card OTA. You need to physically copy the files to one of the computers associated with your account. In order to magically “sync” photos, you must open the camera application from a menu within the SugarSync app. Then you take a photo and it uploads to your SugarSync Mobile Photos folder. The photos are then synced to your computers–BUT THEY ARE NOT SAVED ON YOUR DEVICE. And like I said above you can’t upload photos after the fact directly from your BB. So you then have to download them back to your device. Cumbersome.
So–it’s SLOW (so is iDisk), it can’t brainlessly backup photos of my adorable kids that I take with my BB, and it’s S-L-O-W! The Magic Briefcase is pretty cool.
27 min to go!