ZumoDrive, my new gig

About two months ago I made the tough decision to depart PowerReviews to join a small startup called Zecter. Zecter's flagship product is ZumoDrive, a cloud drive for all your internet connected devices. A lot of friends and family have been asking what it is, exactly, and how it works. So I thought I'd just write about how Kjersti and I use it.

The best way to think of ZumoDrive is as a repository for all your stuff: documents, music, photos, movies, etc. The repository appears as a local drive on all your computers once you install the software, just like plugging in a USB stick or external hard drive. But it's so much more than simple storage like an external hard drive.

For one thing, it's a single drive that can be "plugged in" to multiple machines at the same time, all the time, no matter where those machines are. When Kjersti adds a new file to ZumoDrive on her computer, I get a notification and can see it on my computer within seconds. I really like this idea of having a "single source of truth" for all our important data. I don't have to keep track of which computer a file is on. I don't have to worry about losing any of my data if one of those devices dies or gets lost or something. And when I replace my old computer with a new one, I don't have to worry about migrating everything over (have you ever tried to do this by burning CD-Rs or DVD-Rs?!).

I think the value that ZumoDrive provides just for online backup is pretty substantial in itself. For instance, when you edit a document in your ZumoDrive, it saves revisions, so you can revert to any past version. Say goodbye to all the Report (Copy).doc, Report (Final version).doc silliness. Accidentally deleted a file? Just go to the recycle bin on the ZumoDrive site and restore it. And if you lose your laptop, or your house burns down along with all your computers, external hard drives, and USB sticks, your stuff is safe in the cloud! In fact, since we use Amazon's S3 service, your data is ensured to be stored in 3 different earthquake zones, so it's a hell of a lot safer than any external backup disk. Just because you have an external hard drive, doesn't mean your stuff is safe. In fact, by getting a second hard drive, you've doubled the probability of one of them dying. Don't delude yourself into thinking your data is nice and backed up on that external hard drive!

ZumoDrive appears as a local disk to your computer. For example, on Windows you'll have a Z: drive. This means all your desktop applications, like iTunes, Word, Excel, iPhoto, Picasa, etc. already know how to store stuff on your ZumoDrive, because for all it knows it's a regular drive! You don't have to worry about manually uploading files you save from these applications, it's done for you. ZumoDrive also works well when you're not connected to the internet. Just keep saving stuff to it as usual, and when you go online again, ZumoDrive will start uploading automatically in the background.

Going along with the "single source of truth" idea, your ZumoDrive is effectively unlimited storage. It doesn't matter if your computer only has 30 GB available but you want to store 400 GB. ZumoDrive treats your local disk as a cache. It will stream content from the cloud on-demand and store it in the cache as needed. And it will do its best to intelligently pick your most used files to keep in the cache. But even if a file is not in the cache yet, this doesn't mean you have to wait for the whole thing to be downloaded. Depending on the type of file, it can most likely be streamed. Like if you start playing a song in iTunes, after we fetch the first few kilobytes, the music can start playing. Sort of like a YouTube video. The song can start playing within a second even if it will take a minute or so to download the whole thing. This technique generalizes to all types of files, too, not just music and videos.

Putting your music collection onto ZumoDrive is probably one of the most killer use cases. With our music on the ZumoDrive, Kjersti and I can share our collection, instead of each having our own overlapping set of music on our laptops. If she downloads a new song, I can play it instantly! But the best part about this isn't when we're on the laptops, but the iPhones. With the ZumoDrive iPhone app, we can both access the whole music collection all the time -- even though it's bigger than either of our iPhones have space for! I hate having to sync my iPhone with iTunes and pick and choose which songs I want on it. I just want everything to be available. And if I buy a new song, I don't want to have to wait until I sync again for it to appear on my iPhone. With the ZumoDrive app, I can just stream the music instantly (as long as I have an internet connection). Oh, and if my connection sucks because I'm on EDGE instead of 3G or something, the ZumoDrive server will automatically "downsample" the music to a lower bitrate so it will download faster.

The mobile aspect of ZumoDrive is definitely one of the best parts. With all these netbooks and tablets and smartphones coming out, you're very likely very soon to have several internet connected devices where you'll want to access your documents, photos, music, etc. You don't want to have to keep copying stuff around to each of the devices! And even with software to take care of all this syncing, you have to pick and choose what content you want to go on what devices. In fact, DropBox (probably the best of the sync solutions out there) doesn't even have this "selective sync" functionality yet, although it is their most requested feature. So if one of your computers doesn't have enough free space to hold all the content in your dropbox, you're SOL. Not even something you have to think about with ZumoDrive.

I already mentioned how cool it is to have access to my whole music collection from our iPhones... Well, the same goes for photos. We've got a fairly large collection of photos from over the years, taken with our digital camera or phones. I had them all organized in folders on my hard drive, and had been manually backing them up (cuz once you lose your photos you can't get them back!). I was also uploading them to Flickr to share with friends and family, but it's been so long since I've done that because it's such a pain. I have to wait forever for it to upload, then go through and add titles and captions. And usually the upload fails part of the way through and I have to start over, but make sure not to re-upload duplicates. When I installed Zumo, I just dragged all my photos in and voila, they're backed up. Maybe I want to share an album? Just right click on the folder and get a link that I can paste into an email or IM. When someone opens the link they get a nice view on the web where they can watch a slideshow. Or they can download the whole album as a zip, or individual photos. It's so much easier than Flickr! This photo album feature is fairly new, as well, and we'll be improving on it.

Oh, and Kjersti takes a lot of pictures with her iPhone these days, and for a while she was emailing the photos to herself. But with the ZumoDrive iPhone app, I showed her that she can just upload the photo directly to ZumoDrive from the iPhone. I love this feature because when she takes a picture of Garbanzo at the dog park, I get a Growl notification on my computer at work and can see it instantly. :)

I mentioned the sharing aspect, but this goes even further. When you right-click on a file or folder in your ZumoDrive you can do a couple of things. You can "get link" which will generate a hyperlink you can share with anyone (even if they don't have a ZumoDrive account). Or, you can share the file or folder with another ZumoDrive user. Just enter their email address and they'll get a notification. Once they accept the share, the folder will show up in their Z: drive as well. Now you can collaborate on a project without having to email files back and forth!

So this is has gotten pretty long. It just goes to show how useful ZumoDrive is and how many ways there are to use it. It's been under heavy development for a while and has gotten fairly stable. I would recommend it to anyone. You can get 1 GB for free, so there's no harm in trying it out. In fact, 1 GB might be enough for you, but probably not after you start adding your media content. But like I described above, music and photos are some of the best use cases for ZumoDrive, so you're missing out. Upgrade to a larger drive and pay monthly, you can downgrade at any time.

Okay, there's one last feature I want to tell you about. It's been in the works for quite a while, and we are getting ready to release it. I've been using it for a couple of months now and I love it. It's called folder linking. This enables you to link any folder on your computer with ZumoDrive. For instance, instead of moving all my music into the Z: drive, I just right-clicked on my existing Music folder and added it as a linked folder. Now it shows up in ZumoDrive under /Linked Folders/Greg's Computer/Music. I can still get my music on my iPhone and share with Kjersti and everything. I didn't even have to configure iTunes to keep its music in a different location. It just works.

So if I seem pretty busy these days, this is why. We're hard at work making ZumoDrive better. It helps that we are some of its most avid users. We also talk quite a bit with our users on the ZumoDrive forums, so if you have any issues or questions or suggestions, head on over there. You'll get a response from one of us within a day or two.

Thanks for reading!