In my last article I talked about how you can often sync pretty much all of your documents online for free by using different services. However if you are putting your documents on several services indiscriminately, things can get messy. You may find yourself looking for a document for your work or ministry, and have to search in several locations for it.
Segmentation is Key
If you try to keep things organized on your computer, more than likely you put different things in different folders. For instance maybe you have a folder in your documents that says work, one that says personal, and maybe there is a family documents folder. There are a lot of ways you can split things up on your computer, likewise as you start using cloud services, you can use different cloud services for different kinds of documents. Here is how I am currently doing things.
Google Drive
I use it for a certain subset of my documents. Mostly it is used for Google documents on my Google work account have been shared with me by other team members in my ministry or ones that I am sharing.
Sky Drive
New Sky Drive users can sync 7 GB of space, while people who have used it before can now sync the 25 GB of space they already had if they sign in and click a link to claim that space. So for me since I have 25 GB that gives me as much space as I should ever need for my personal random documents. That all goes here
SugarSync
This is one that I loved when I first started using it. I thought it had a lot of potential, and I looked forward to it maturing into a pretty amazing product. However with time, even though they did continue to add features, they didn’t add a lot of the ones I was hoping for (like lan syncing) and some of the bugs it has just won’t go away. However, I still use it, mostly for sharing files and folders with other people. When I want to send someone a link to a document or file, I use this. It also has a plugin that allows me to easily create links to really large files in outlook. So for my SugarSync = Sharing, it is kind of like my shared folder.
Dropbox
When I first started using Dropbox years ago my wife and I used it mostly for raising support for our ministry. This is still where we keep our prayer letters, and our database file for the software we use for MPD (we use TntMPD). While there are other ways I probably could be using it, this has served me well.
As you may have noticed, I choose what services to use for what documents often based on the features of a particular service. I use Google Drive for Google Docs, Sky Drive for my many personal Microsoft Office files, and SugarSync for sharing because of its integration with Outlook. You can go further with this. If you want to further segment your online syncing you can find more lesser known cloud syncing solutions using alternativeto.com. Just tell it what program you are using and it will show you other similar programs, many of which have smaller free accounts like Dropbox and Google Drive.
What I like about all of this is because I use different services for different things I have most of my life synced online for free. I don’t always have the syncing services for all of these running all the time. I typically only start up some services like SugarSync or Sky Drive or others when I am going to be using some of those files. Do you use more than one cloud syncing service? How do cloud services fit into your life? Do you try to segment your life in the Cloud? Let us know in the comments.
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