New Delhi, Mar.15: When now we have started to put more things on “cloud” and even the computer manufacturers have started to appreciate this by making the hard disk smaller with mobile computing still denting the concepts of hard disk, it is time that “cloud” itself be made personalized.
Talking of those days of “dial-up” Internet, the computer’s hard disk was often the central hub of all your digital activity. The only thing that possibly stayed in the cloud was your email but everything else – including photos, videos, documents and other files – would reside locally on the disk. That was convenient because files were always accessible (even while you were offline) and you could use built-in search programs to easily sift through all the different types of data.
Fast forward to today and the way you create and manage data has undergone a sea change.
You capture photographs and videos on your mobile phone and upload them directly to your Facebook account, completely bypassing the computer. You can use the web browser on your computer to create documents, but instead of storing them on your hard disk, you put the documents on the servers of Google Docs. The same is true for other important files, scattered across multiple online websites like Dropbox, Box, Picasa, SkyDrive. The list goes on.
The reasons why we are relying more and more on cloud services to store our data are pretty obvious. These services are inexpensive – most offer free accounts that are good enough for an average consumer – and they are likely to take good care of your data. Most of us aren’t creating backups of our important files as often as we should, but if the files are stored in the cloud, we are covered.
But this new approach creates new challenges. How do you know if the documents you saved last month are in Dropbox or Google Docs? And if they are in Google Docs, how do you easily move them to another cloud service? Fortunately, there exists another set of web apps that will help you better manage your various cloud services.
One of my favorite apps in this category is Otixo (http://otixo.com/) – it’s something like Windows Explorer (or Finder on Mac) for all your online accounts. With Otixo, you can access your different online accounts from a central location as if they were different drives on the same computer.
You can move files across cloud services using standard copy-paste without having to download them to the computer. Otixo also offers a unified search function so you can easily find files that are otherwise spread across various online accounts, from one place.
You can use Otixo to manage your Dropbox, Google Docs, Picasa, Sugar Sync and Amazon accounts. The basic version of Otixo is free, though there is a monthly limit on data transfer (250 MB).
While Otixo seeks to provide easy access to your online files, another set of apps – notably Cloud Magic (https://cloudmagic.com/) and Greplin (https://www.greplin.com/) – are positioning themselves as personal search engines for your online files.
The idea is similar. You need to connect your different online accounts – like Twitter, Google, Facebook – with these services and it then indexes your files, tweets, status updates, calendar events and other data in the background. Once the indexes are ready, you can search them from your desktop or mobile phone
And as new data becomes available in your online accounts, these search indexes are refreshed automatically so you don’t have to spend time guessing where those files are.
New Delhi, Mar.15: When now we have started to put more things on “cloud” and even the computer manufacturers have started to appreciate this by making the hard disk smaller with mobile computing still denting the concepts of hard disk, it is time that “cloud” itself be made personalized.
Talking of those days of “dial-up” Internet, the computer’s hard disk was often the central hub of all your digital activity. The only thing that possibly stayed in the cloud was your email but everything else – including photos, videos, documents and other files – would reside locally on the disk. That was convenient because files were always accessible (even while you were offline) and you could use built-in search programs to easily sift through all the different types of data.
Fast forward to today and the way you create and manage data has undergone a sea change.
You capture photographs and videos on your mobile phone and upload them directly to your Facebook account, completely bypassing the computer. You can use the web browser on your computer to create documents, but instead of storing them on your hard disk, you put the documents on the servers of Google Docs. The same is true for other important files, scattered across multiple online websites like Dropbox, Box, Picasa, SkyDrive. The list goes on.
The reasons why we are relying more and more on cloud services to store our data are pretty obvious. These services are inexpensive – most offer free accounts that are good enough for an average consumer – and they are likely to take good care of your data. Most of us aren’t creating backups of our important files as often as we should, but if the files are stored in the cloud, we are covered.
But this new approach creates new challenges. How do you know if the documents you saved last month are in Dropbox or Google Docs? And if they are in Google Docs, how do you easily move them to another cloud service? Fortunately, there exists another set of web apps that will help you better manage your various cloud services.
One of my favorite apps in this category is Otixo (http://otixo.com/) – it’s something like Windows Explorer (or Finder on Mac) for all your online accounts. With Otixo, you can access your different online accounts from a central location as if they were different drives on the same computer.
You can move files across cloud services using standard copy-paste without having to download them to the computer. Otixo also offers a unified search function so you can easily find files that are otherwise spread across various online accounts, from one place.
You can use Otixo to manage your Dropbox, Google Docs, Picasa, Sugar Sync and Amazon accounts. The basic version of Otixo is free, though there is a monthly limit on data transfer (250 MB).While Otixo seeks to provide easy access to your online files, another set of apps – notably Cloud Magic (https://cloudmagic.com/) and Greplin (https://www.greplin.com/) – are positioning themselves as personal search engines for your online files.
The idea is similar. You need to connect your different online accounts – like Twitter, Google, Facebook – with these services and it then indexes your files, tweets, status updates, calendar events and other data in the background. Once the indexes are ready, you can search them from your desktop or mobile phone.
And as new data becomes available in your online accounts, these search indexes are refreshed automatically so you don’t have to spend time guessing where those files are.
