Born and raised in the midlands of South Carolina, I've been working in the IT industry since 1997, and building websites since before that.3 weeks ago
Dropbox vs Google Docs
When it comes to simple, pain-free cloud storage, Dropbox has risen to the top of the heap. For years I’ve used my free 3GBs of space from Dropbox between my laptop, Android phone, and business desktop, and recently my new HP Touchpad. The only problem has been the amount of free storage. 3GBs doesn’t go very far these days, but to jump up to the next level (50GBs) it takes a subscription of $10/month, or $120/year.
Admittedly, that’s a LOT of cloud storage for only $120/year, and the service works great. But I’ve never been able to make the jump with a price that high. Call me cheap.
But as my life becomes more mobile, and my devices varied, I felt like the time had come to search out a more affordable path to a cloud existence. I calculate my “net data” to be around 100GB including my music, movie, and photo collections, and to have those items available on the go, at the office, or anywhere else for that matter is the next logical step.
Enter Google Docs. We’ve all seen how Google has handed out 1GB of free storage for Google Docs (unless you have your files in the Google Docs/Spreadsheets formats, in which case your storage space is limitless). What I found after looking closer was a much better price/year for vast amounts of storage space. Here’s the breakdown:
- 20 GB – $5/yr
- 80 GB – $20/yr
- 200 GB – $50/yr
- 400 GB – $100/yr
- 1 TB – $256/yr
Now that’s a ridiculous amount of space for really cheap! I’ve signed up with the $5/year plan to start with, just to test it out, but $50/year should house my entire electronic livelihood without any trouble. 200GB in the cloud is just silly. And awesome.
But wait, you say! How am I supposed to auto-sync my folders to Google Docs like I do with Dropbox? Ah, you’re right, that’s always been the rub. Dropbox’s sync mechanism is very reliable and extremely fast, and in this area Google can’t compete. But with a subscription to a $20/year program called SyncDocs it’s possible. Is it as reliable as Dropbox? Only time will tell. But so far it’s been able to keep my 3GB collection synced up just fine, and is as unobtrusive as Dropbox in the system tray. From my initial observations it doesn’t seem quite as fast, but once I get my collection up there it shouldn’t be difficult to keep synced. The only major difference I’ve seen so far is that in order to share a folder I’ll have to visit the Google Docs website, but that’s not exactly a hardship.
If anyone has any better (or cheaper) options for always-on cloud storage, please pass them along!
Yes I Own A Touchpad
Which means that this is good news!
What Is The Cloud?
Over at The Cason Connection Blog I had an article published today regarding the term “the cloud” and what it all means, check it out!
Updating Sharepoint WSS 3 to Foundation
Sorry for the lag in posts around here, it’s been an incredibly busy July for me. I had a son in mid-June and am moving at the end of July, so everything in between has been dominating my schedule. Hopefully I’ll get back to in full very soon!
Anyway, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been attempting to update our Sharepoint WSS 3.0 server at work to Foundation Server 2010. When I started out, I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. Both of them are made by Microsoft, this upgrade has to happen all the time, right? Well… not exactly. Not from what I found out anyway.
Google Music Review
A few posts back I wrote a quick note about my pending invitation request with Google Music, and a plea for an outstanding online music player. Well, after waiting for a few weeks I finally got my invitation, and wanted to post a few opinions on the service, both likes and dislikes.
On the whole, the music player is OK. I’ve read some reviews that are blasting it for not being enough of a “music store” like Amazon’s Cloud Player service, as well as some praising it for being completely wonderful. So that I don’t bore you with the details of the service, here are a few of pros and cons from my perspective:
Windows Server Time
The last few weeks at work I’ve been struggling to keep our server clocks synchronized. We have around 10 servers in our domain, a few of them physical but most of them virtual. The problem is that our primary domain controller is a Server 2003 box that we’ve been relying on for far too long. Every morning when I arrive all the client PC clocks across our network are several minutes slow, in comparison to the actual time as well as to our PDC’s clock. After reading up on how this should work over at the Windows Server Time blog, I’m still baffled.
According to the design, all the secondary domain controllers should be pulling their time from my PDC, so whether the PDC’s clock is set by its own internal clock or from an external source is irrelevant. That’s not happening though. When I check the 3 domain controllers, the two secondary DCs (running Server 2003r2 and 2008r2, by the way) are exactly the same, and they’ve strayed away from the PDC’s time by several minutes. Every morning. And not by the same amount. Sometimes it’s 1 minute, sometimes it’s 5 minutes, sometimes 10 minutes. It makes absolutely no sense to me!
My plan of attack is to move our PDC emulator role to the 2008 DC, then set that server to rely on an external time source to stay accurate. The only thing I can think is that there’s something weird about having a 2008r2 server relying on a 2003 box for its time, but I can’t find any evidence to back that theory up. There could also be something going on with the virtual host –> virtual server hierarchy, but I also have not found evidence about that. If anyone has any ideas for me, please feel free to shout out!
On Inspiration…
I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act.
My New Favorite IT Training Resource: Lynda.com
I’ve got a new coworker in my IT department, and while thinking about his training regimine, I thought it would be really nice to have an alternative to the standard all-day, multi-day computer courses offered by our local tech training companies. I’d heard of Lynda.com before, so I decided to check it out. So far I’ve been very pleased!
There are tons of courses and software titles to choose from, and they are well structured, easy to follow, and very in-depth. My coworker is starting with the 2-hour long Microsoft Outlook course, and I can even track and see how much he’s completed so far. There are more advanced Outlook courses as well, and one for each version that we use at my company (2003-2010).
I’m also looking forward to (when I have some time) going through some web design topics, including Chris Coyier’s course on WordPress theme creation. Also there are hundreds of Adobe courses available, all of which I could use some work on.