Zumodrive and Dropbox Comparison – So which is best?
In a simple answer for the zumodrive and dropbox comparison: It depends what you need them for.
What were my needs?
I run:
2 apple mac laptops at home and 2 iphones, with wireless and 3G, though broadband in New Zealand isn’t the fastest it is in other countries.
I need:
- To stop duplicating photos across both laptops (we currently store our photos on both laptops and have a backup on a drobo external device) to give more workable disk space on the laptops.
- To share files easily with clients
- To stop ever worrying about if my files would be lost – we lived in Papua New Guinea for almost 18 months, and I needed to know that if my laptop was stolen, I could be working again within 24 hours.
I address all my needs above today by using a combination of ZumoDrive and Dropbox.
In this zumodrive and dropbox comparison, I’ll share the reasons why I think together they’re an awesome combination.
Background of how I decided in the zumodrive and dropbox comparison
I went through a long process to decide on the best solution for me, and looked at a host of others (amazon (complex), apples idisk (bad experience of reliability in the past), local storage (drobo and time machine – some good and some bad things), mozy (works really well as a pure backup only) but what I was most after was true portability, reliability, backup that just works on a mac and peace of mind – after all, isn’t that what we all want when we back something up?
How I use zumodrive and dropbox today
Zumodrive has a really nice feature of automatically integrating with iphoto and itunes, so you can automatically integrate your photos and music with your cloud storage. This is perfect for me running two laptops, so when my wife downloads photos from the camera on her macbook, it’ll automatically update my library on my macbook – one less job I have to do, great stuff.
Also, with the shared storage, that means almost 30GB is freed up from both hers and my laptop, meaning more room for larger files and less time to have to do housekeeping on my laptop, which gets in the way of me being productive for others.
Why a zumodrive and dropbox comparison was vital to me
What dropbox has that is vital to my business and marketing consulting work I do for clients is sharing files. Dropbox is so easy to use that I don’t have to worry when I ask my clients, who are largely non technical, to install dropbox and then to share a directory. Once the directory is shared, hey presto, we both now can copy and paste (and work directly with) files inside our shared directory, and it synchronizes between theirs and my computer (as well as in the dropbox cloud for backup). I’ve heard of others who link their dropbox to their zumodrive, but I wouldn’t as it doubles up on backup space being used, when after all dropbox replicates/backups your files, but you are still working on the primary file on your computer.
Zumodrive can be configured to replicate the cloud files on your computer at different levels (ie 100% on your computer as well, or 5%, or even 0% – that’s up to you – their easy tutorials and instructions help you along that path).
As part of the Zumodrive and dropbox comparison they have mac, windows and iphone/ipod versions for free, which is great.
Links for you are here by the way:
The other great part about them both is they have free storage for you to try them out, so why not give them a go to see if they are right for you too?!
Until next time,
Jamie
p.s. If you’ve found this zumodrive and dropbox comparison helpful, or want to share any constructive feedback, feel free to leave a comment.