Notice to Clients: SugarSync a service we have frequently recommended has decided to withdraw its free version offering 5GB of cloud storage and, instead, forcing users to upgrade to a paid version.
So another service ‘bites-the-dust’ – this happened a year or two ago where Social Media Management Tool Hootsuite did the same thing. The pattern runs thus:
Startup a truly great service, offer it free, offer additional upgrades for free when you recommend to others. When you have enough paying customers, close down the free side of the business.
At this point one of two things will happen – you may get such a bad reputation that you’ll never fully recover (www.ning.com) and eventually you’ll go out of business or you may limp on and need to re-start some sort of limited free Service (www.hootsuite.com).
The only company I know that have it right is Google. They have stopped all free Google Apps for Business accounts and it’s worth noting a few things about that:
- We know clients who signed up at the start and have 50 free Google Apps for Business ‘seats’
- We know others who have 10 free ‘seats’ (as Google got wise they gradually reduced the incentive
- All Free Google Apps users will remain free for LIFE… this allows for a natural drop off as people do eventually upgrade or drop out for other reasons
- We have become Google Partners and now resell Google Services.
Here at NComp@ss, we have gone from being a recommender of services – to actively selling them. That is quite a feat. Google has converted us, worked with us and allowed us to continue our good work of sharing their service faultlessly.
The Alternatives
Now you want to know Alternatives to SugarSync. There are lots:
Dropbox
We’ll start with dropbox because we recommend avoiding this service. There are two principal reasons for this apart from the fact they are quite mean with their free space.
- All the free space is double-counted – let’s say you share a 100MB folder of images, with other Dropbox users, then this 100MB folder counts 100MB towards your folder and 100MB towards their folder. The result is you soon use up all your space. We have 250GB of files on our 2GB account. Dropbox just spends their time reminding me to upgrade.
- Dropbox is precisely that – you have a DropBox folder on your computer or device and you have to ‘drop’ files into it. This separates your day to day filing into on DropBox and not on Dropbox, it’s very clumsy, DropBox is only really good for sharing specific files that you want to share at that time. It’s not good as a general backup solution in the cloud.
Copy.com
Currently Copy.com is offering the best deal in almost every way. You get 15GB of free space and 5GB every time you refer someone else to sign up and they also get 5GB of free space if respond to your invite, so effectively anyone you recommend gets 20GB of space – that is generous by any stretch.
But we also like the fact they are hardware company Barracuda – they make Hard Disks and somehow we feel they understand the whole business of storage. They have basically taken their hardware business into the Cloud.
You can also choose any folder on your computer to be the ‘Copy’ folder – this is is a sort of halfway house between SugarSync (any folders) and DropBox (one specific folder) – but the result is that you can use Copy.com as a full on back up service.
The Others
- www.box.com – is supposed to be excellent – but it’s pricey
- www.tresorit.com – works like SugarSync but is considerably less well known
- Google Drive – this is not really an alternative, but it has lots of free storage
Organisation
This is everything with all these services – particularly in a corporate environment you need to be extremely organised and have a full understanding of how these services work. Or you will rapidly get lost.
Common issues include:
- Losing files or going back to older versions
- Whose editing what – keeping a log of the people involved
- What to do when someone leaves, i.e. preventing access from old employees
As an organisation, you need to think this out before committing to any Cloud Storage solution. All these services probably have gazillions of folders and files are simply never accessed. People just uploading their Photos or Music collections just to forget about them.
The organisation is everything.
Conclusion
We are sorry that we ever recommended SugarSync to anyone, and hesitate to recommend Copy.com as it may go the same way one day, SugarSync (like Hootsuite) are letting down their customers and not really playing the game properly. They won’t get our endorsement any longer.
Whether SugarSync now disappears or withers is another question, we suspect they have a sufficiently strong bank balance that will actually see them through this next phase and indeed we wish them luck.
One thing is for sure – Cloud Storage solutions have come of age, they are useful and easy to manage, but they are a commodity and like all commodities, the price will drop considerably more – the more people use them.
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