I find SugarSync fantastic. Enough storage space to meet my complete backup needs (60GB in my case) for a reasonable monthly price. The Mac app works well, even though it doesn’t quite feel like a native Mac application. The web site works great too. I can easily access files I’ve backed up from my main computer when I’m on the road. The iPhone version of the site is a bit limited – it allows you to browse the files, but I have trouble actually viewing PDF files, for example.

Besides having it automatically backup whichever folders from you computer you want backed up, there’s also a “Web Archive” area where you can drag files into and organize as you wish, without having to keep them on your computer.

I don’t really need the sync for anything but media and ITunes/Picasa/iPhoto integration would be a huge deal maker for me.

Otherwise, many of these features are part of Get Drop Box http://getdropbox.com/

Now that my Mozy (online backup service) just came up for renewal, maybe I’ll try Sugarsync or GetDropBox and kill two birds with one stone?

Thanks for the interesting article.

Anne: We experienced a couple of initial hiccups what with the greater-than-expected demand for the service, so if you’d like to try again, you should be fine.

Michael: Currently we allow you to replicate songs in the Music folder across your multiple computers, iTunes doesn’t have anything to do with this. If some of those songs are iTunes DRM protected (so not MP3s), you would of course need to authorize your secondary computer before you can play them there. We are enhancing the functionality to build a connector to iTunes to sync playlists and other meta data. iTunes provides an interface to allow developers to do this.

Oxuson: Some of the reasons why you might consider switching from iDisk are i. superior sync functionality ii. broad mobile support iii. optional PC sync for those that also use a PC and iv. better price. The best way of course to figure out the difference and what your best option is to try the product.

Darren: the Outlook sync functionality is on our roadmap. As Walt mentions in the article, this is something we have demonstrated in public, but the launch timing has been an issue of resources prioritization.

Paul: We have made optimizations to ensure that we throttle the network bandwidth usage, limit memory usage on workstations, move minimal amount of data to make the sync fast, etc. That said, during that initial sync, most people have a lot of stuff that ultimately has to move over the network, but after that, it is only incremental changes that need to be synchronized, so it is pretty fast. Again, the best way to find out if it works for you is to try the product for free.

Thanks for your interest in SugarSync and if you do try it out, please let us know how we can make the product better for you.

Cheers,

Gibu Thomas
CEO, Sharpcast

Or perhaps more accurately, how well does iTunes handle having a song track that it thinks it “owns” fiddled with directly, instead of by its own control?