Nick Projects

In any office it is pretty much a requirement to be able to move files across different machines.  Many companies have several shared network drives and highly organized directory structures to allow data to be easy to find and available for all employees to access.  There are dozens of methods to accomplish this in a distributed manner.  This post will cover just a few. 

Hamachi allows users to create VPN networks with minimal configuration.  Simply install Hamachi on all computers to be networked and you are pretty much done.  Setting up a VPN has several advantages.  For starters it networks the computers which will allow file, print and screen sharing across the machines.  This will allow users to map network drives and is also a great way to set up multiplayer games. 

Drop Box:  While simple file sharing utilities won’t give you as much flexibility as the virtual VPN created with Hamachi, it is a great way to move files from one computer to another very quickly.  Dropbox is crazy simple to use and has tons of flexibility for controlling which files get shared and who can see them.  For more information about drop box see my previous post on dropbox. 

Jungle Disk:  Jungle disk is a little less flexible than dropbox but it uses Amazon S3 as the backend.  Jungle Disk is primarily for creating mapped network drives based on S3 buckets.  The advantage is that you get to use the ridiculously powerful Amazon cloud network.  Also for this reason it is a good solution for people who have tons of data to share,  if you deal with large images and can see yourself requiring a network drive with 20 – 40 gb of data on it;  jungle disk is the way to go.  For more details on Jungle Disk see my previous post. 

Share this post:

Drop box is a worthwhile tool for doing some basic file synchronizing between a few computers.  I don’t know if I would recommend it for storing your life’s collection of digital photos,  but if you had a handful that you wanted to move between your laptop and desktop it would be a good tool.  Likewise I wouldn’t keep my MP3 collection on it,  but if there were a CD I wanted to listen to at the office drop box lets you move the files fairly seamlessly.   Drop box is a good service because it’s goal is to synchronize files across the internet.  This means that the idea isn’t to be accessing files from a web disk or a web based location, rather, they are housed on a local computer and then uploaded and downloaded.  This is a good way to go for web based storage because no matter who you are,  your local computer is faster than the internet.

Also Dropbox has some team features other than synchronization that makes it worth mentioning.

• Drop box allows you to access your files online.
  This is a cool feature for college students and other people who find themselves using public or computers that are not their own but still want their stuff.
• Drop box keeps a revision history.  This is a pretty good thing for most people who find themselves revising documents.  Or even worse work with other people who revise documents.  Each time a file is synchronized a backup of the original is kept.  This way if you accidentally save over your changes or someone else s you can roll back to the previous copy.
• Drop box allows you to share files with other people.  This is sort of cool.  With Jungle disk you would have to set up a unique bucket and trust people not to snoop through your stuff.  With drop box you can say mom gets to see this folder but not others. ( not that I encourage hiding things from your mother)

In conclusion,  I have Jungle disk set up and working well so I probably won’t be using dropbox for too much, but it is a good solution if you aren’t ready to comit to a full online storage solution.

Share this post: