In today's highly mobile world, it wouldn't be at all unusual to check your email on your tablet before you even got out of bed in the morning, finish up a presentation for your boss on your home desktop PC, and even update the sales figures on that business plan from your smartphone late that night. Yet how can you keep all of those files available and in sync no matter where or how you're accessing them?
In the olden days, you might have relied on USB thumb drives, or perhaps you just emailed files back and forth to yourself. Things have gotten a lot easier now with the advent of cloud-based online storage services. Still, how do you choose the one that's best for meeting your own needs, whether those are more related to photo sharing, file sync, or group editing, for instance? Here's the lowdown on four services that you might consider: Dropbox, Box, and the newer Cubby and Google Drive.Dropbox (2GB for free, up to 18GB total with referrals, up to 100GB for $199 yearly)
Dropbox is the current market leader, and with good reason. It's incredibly easy to use and very reliable. The service monitors one particular folder on your computer and automatically uploads files in that folder to your Dropbox. You can then access those files either from within Finder on a Mac, the standard Windows file system on a PC, any web browser, or the free apps available for mobile devices. Those apps run on Android smartphones and tablets, as well as on Apple's iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
Once you sign in to your Dropbox account on your mobile device, you'll find a simple interface which looks just like a traditional computer file system. If you mark individual files as favorites, you'll be able to access those files offline when you don't have an Internet connection (when service goes down, during an airplane flight, etc.).
The Android and iOS tablet apps are relatively bare bones, but they work just fine. No matter what mobile platform you're using, you can view some file types within the Dropbox app itself, most notably plain text, PDFs, and both JPEG and PNG photos. Other files -- such as Microsoft Office documents and ePub eBooks -- are opened in helper apps like Polaris Office on Android devices or Documents to Go, GoodReader, iBooks, or Stanza on the iPad.
If you want to edit your files from directly within the Dropbox app, you can do so only on Android devices, and even then only for plain text files. Other document types can be edited by external apps such as Polaris Office on Android devices, and with apps such as Pages or Documents to Go on iOS devices.
Dropbox, though, needs to keep innovating or it runs the risk of falling behind some of the "younger" services such as Google Drive and Cubby. As things stand, Dropbox is an excellent backup and file storage/synchronization service. Yet it doesn't offer any real editing or collaboration tools. It also forces users to keep all of their files in a single Dropbox folder for synchronization. The smartphone and tablet apps are straightforward and easy to use, but they could be more feature-rich.
Box (5GB for free, up to 50GB of total storage available for $19.99 a month)
Box is similar to Dropbox in its cloud storage and synchronization services. However, Box adds some clever collaboration tools to the mix, as well. For example, you can share individual files or entire folders with a few clicks. You can also embed files on a web page for public viewing, with full control over whether users can print, download, or share the file.
If you're working with a group, you can add collaborators to each folder in your Dropbox, share direct links to individual files, and add comments as well, instead of needing to send a flurry of email messages back and forth each time a document warrants discussion.
The Box mobile apps are available for Android and iOS, plus BlackBerry PlayBook and the webOS TouchPad. They don't offer much in the way of built-in editing features, but they do work with external helper apps such as Quickoffice, PaperPort Notes, and PDF Expert to make the editing process as seamless as possible.
Box also places a strong emphasis on security, with the mobile apps optionally requiring a four digit unlock code each time the app is launched, in addition to the regular login information. You can optionally cache all recent files as they are accessed within the mobile app, or you can mark individual files as favorites for offline access.
The Box smartphone and tablets app also offer some unique features. For instance, there's an Update tab that lets you know what the latest activity was and exactly when it happened, including the name of the person who accessed each file. You can also create batch uploads of photos and videos directly from your smartphone or tablet, instead of uploading one at a time, or -- as with the other file sharing apps covered here -- only allowing the upload of individual new photos taken from within the app.
Box is more expensive overall than Dropbox, but it provides more collaboration and workgroup features. Arguably, the mobile apps are more polished as well, with better security and real time notifications regarding who has accessed your files.
Box might be overkill for someone who just wants to back up his or her files. Yet for groups and enterprise customers, it offers some compelling features. Moreover, it's the only one of the four services covered here to provide mobile apps for all four tablet platforms: Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and webOS.
Cubby (5GB for free)
Cubby isn't quite on the scene yet, although it's almost there. Currently in beta, Cubby is the new file sharing service from LogMeIn, the popular remote desktop application that allows you to access your home computer from anywhere. I've only been using the service for a few days, and I'm already quite impressed.
Cubby is more more flexible than Dropbox in that any folder can be designated as a "cubby." Consequently, you don't need to change the way you've already organized your files. Cubby also offers strong file sharing tools, allowing you to create public links for either individual files or for an entire cubby folder. On the other hand, Cubby doesn't have the emphasis on collaboration and group editing which you'll find in Google Drive.
One of Cubby's more interesting concepts is unlimited peer-to-peer syncing. If you've been struggling for a long time to keep multiple computers in sync and you haven't found a good solution, Cubby has you covered. Once you set up the service on two computers (such as home and work, or the home desktop and your laptop), you can designate specific cubby folders to sync between the two. The service will then work seamlessly in the background to keep them both in lockstep.
Even better, there are practically no GB limits. If you have 20GB of vacation photos on your desktop that you also want on your laptop, Cubby will do that for you. The only limit which applies is 5GB total for Cubby folders that are synced to the cloud for use with mobile devices. Both the Android and iOS apps are already available in their respective stores.
As with Dropbox, you can mark individual files as favorites for offline access. You can also upload files or photos from your mobile device to Cubby, making the service a great way to share photos if you'd rather send the pics directly instead of publicly uploading your life to Facebook and Flickr.
If you're the forgetful type, or the sort to delete first and realize later that you needed a particular file, you'll be glad to know that Cubby has the ability to restore deleted files from the archive. Cubby also keeps multiple versions of each file, just in case you later decide that you liked chapter 8 of your novel better before you revised it.
Even though it's currently only a beta offering, Cubby already gets a lot of things right. The Android and iOS apps are well polished and extremely fast. The service deserves close attention, especially if you are concerned more about synchronization and sharing than with group editing and collaboration.
Google Drive (5GB for free, additional storage available for purchase)
Although Google Drive is the newest player in this group, Google has been storing documents and allowing folks to work on them from any web browser for quite some time with Google Docs.
So Google Drive is the spiritual successor to Google Docs. This becomes readily apparent when you access it for the first time. You'll see that anything you've previously stored in Google Docs is already available in your Google Drive.
You'll also encounter a short introductory video, After that, you'll be prompted to download and install the Google Drive app on your PC or Mac. Google Drive will then create a folder on your computer.
Anything dragged to that folder will sync with your Google Drive, as well as with all of the devices associated with your Google account, such as tablet computers and smartphones.
Google hasn't yet released any iOS apps for Google Drive, but the Android OS tablet and smartphone experience closely mirrors the desktop experience. Once you download the free Android app from the Google Play store, you'll find that the main screen of the Google Drive app looks almost exactly like what you'd see on a regular computer. You can easily navigate from folder to folder, and you can star your most important documents to make them easier to find. Sharing with one of your Google contacts is a snap. It takes just a couple of taps.
If you want to make individual documents available for offline viewing, you'll need to go through and mark them each individually ahead of time. You can also create new documents by taking a photo of any printed text and uploading it to your Google Drive (although that service is somewhat hit-or-miss at the moment, and it doesn't work at all if you take the photo in landscape mode instead of portrait).
There are a few gotchas with Google Drive that you will want to think about carefully before completely switching over to the service. It's a hybrid file backup/online collaboration tool designed to help you share and collaborate with others more easily. So there's no encryption.
Also, there's no offline editing of Google Docs files. You can view Google Docs files when you're offline, but editing them is not possible even if you've configured offline access in Google Chrome. You can, however, edit Microsoft Office documents offline, and they'll be synchronized back to your Google Drive the next time you're connected.
Google Drive is a no-brainer option for those who are already heavily invested in Google services like GMail and Google Docs, for those who need extensive collaboration tools, and for those who own Android tablets and smartphones. Unfortunately, there is no word yet on when iOS apps for your iPad and iPhone will be available. They have been announced, but Google has not rolled out a timeline for when that will happen.
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