OK, so the title of this post is a backhanded complement to Mr Gates and his often mis-quoted reference to the amount of memory needed on PCs. In my instance I’m referring to the amount of storage I use on DropBox.
Dropbox free accounts provide up to 2GB of online storage, so naturally, I’ve been using the free account. Over the last couple of months I’ve been running my account at about 80-90% capacity. This seems quite nicely to match my working set, so as I start and finish projects, I’m moving my data in and out of the DropBox directory.
Now I could put more data online and take the hit of moving to a paid account, but at this stage I see no need. Firstly, I don’t want to pay for more storage when I’ve paid for a Drobo already. Second, I think keeping my working set of files small allows me to more easily find the data I need when I’m looking for things. Over time, I may choose to go past the 2GB limit, but at the moment, the current free quota suits me just fine.
Now, where am I putting my music I hear you ask? That’s where Zumodrive comes in. My podcasts drop directly into the Zumodrive and from there I can share them to my iPod Touch. If anything, I’m more likely to increase from the free 1GB Zumodrive offer, simply because audio files are that much larger than Word documents or Excel spreadsheets.
This all leads me to two conclusions; first, wouldn’t it be nice if I could slot the Zumodrive and DropBox shares into my directory tree, so for instance, Zumodrive points to C:My Music and Dropbox points to C:My Documents. I know I can redirect these shortcuts on Windows, but I’m thinking bigger and better here, so perhaps one provider slots in as C:My MusicABBA and another as C:My MusicBeeGees. This leads to my second conclusion; if I can redirect my filesystems to many cloud storage providers without changing my directory structure, can I store all my data on free accounts?
