Saturday, November 15, 2008

MyBloop – Unlimited Free Cloud Storage

At first sight, the idea of free and unlimited data storage in the Cloud seems too good to be true. That’s the promise of MyBloop. From this site, you can sign up for a free account, and, in theory, upload as much data as you want. It also appears to be ad-free. While the lack of ads is nice for the user, I’m unclear around their business model. Free storage and the free bandwidth to access, all for free – it’s a nice deal. I love the concept but there are some issues.

First, there is the question of their privacy policy – or lack thereof. I can’t see one on the site. The site iteslf (www.mybloop.com) is not bad, but thin at present. And there’s no user Forums (so I don’t know if my problems are unique).

Once you upload a file, it becomes a shared file – it appears the default is to share the file. There’s also no way to restrict sharing – sharing seem to be all or nothing. From a privacy point of view, these two issues are of some concern. Is MyBloop going to turn into  another porn/warez site (and get closed down shaprish)?

The site provides a downloader file manager to make the process of uploading to MyBloop easier. Great theory, but the program is unstable. I’m averaging 2-3 crashes per uploaded file. BloopLoader does sort of recover from crashes and continues the uploads that were queued before the crash. Or rather it tries to. After a day of use, there are many issues: files that appear to have been uploaded are re-uploaded (duplicate files on server), some file that were queued get lost, some files in process do restart to upload after the restart, but they start from zero.

This could be a great tool, but right now, it’s not really ready for prime time. I hope this is just a phase, and am looking forward to a reply from the site to my comments.

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2 comments:

Luiz Antonio Souza said...

I know what it's like. I'm experiencing that crash problem too. Today I left uploading through the whole night a 700MB video. When I woke up, I thought, "It must be finished, right?", then when I turn on the screen, I see: 98% of the upload was completed and there was a Windows error saying the program has found a problem and blah-blah-blah. Then I said, "OK... let's restart the program, continue upload", but when I do, there's no more upload there to be continued. It simply vanishes!

Hope they are working on this issues and that they solve 'em soon. When that time comes, I'll definitely stop using Megaupload.

alfblack said...

I am using dropbox with no issues. It works well. http://www.getdropbox.com/

Microsoft skydrive is also free. But only works for media

there's also gmail drive. A bit slow to startup but works well also.
http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm