Originally published at: ZipDrive turns any computer into a cloud drive accessible from anywhere for $20 | Boing Boing
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There must be ways to do this without paying ZipDrive
Surely this is impossible. No one could ever invent Dynamic DNS and SFTP.
Sneaker net just works
Jesus! This has made me realize that I used to know Kim Edwards, the CEO of Iomega, in the late 90s!
Does it have Click of Death too?
In the cloud, no one can hear you click.
Never underestimate the latent bandwidth inherent to a stationwagon packed to the gills with scsi drives barreling down the freeway.
I actually just tossed a scsi Zip Drive into the trash 2 weeks ago. The disks, about 20 of them, were copied to CDs then DVDs then hard drives many years ago. When I think how much money I spent on stuff that now cost a fraction of what it used to, I could be retired by now.
Depending on your goals and concerns, Owncloud, Nextcloud, Seafile, Pydio, Sparkleshare, SFTP, rsync, git, or using a third party cloud provider but adding a backup storage system running in a closet somewhere, which can be anything from a fancy server to an old netbook with a USB drive or SBC or whatever.
I also know some folks concerned about access on the road who just run two third-party cloud provider apps pointed at the same directory.
This is, of course, an abridged list.
AFAICT this “ZipDrive” service is unrelated to the former Iomega or its products
Maybe the trademark lapsed, maybe Iomega never bothered to register the phrase “zip drive”
or maybe this is such a fly-by-night scam that the people running it don’t even care about such things
Teamviewer (free), Logmein, GoToMyPC… there’s plenty of these out there that do more or less the same thing by giving you remote access to your home system. I can’t speak to whether or not this is better or worse than those, but if you’re looking for one, look up reviews and do some due diligence.
But for all that’s good and noble in the world, stop calling this shit CLOUD! This is not CLOUD COMPUTING. This is remote access of a system, no freaking cloud involved.
The latency on that connection is pretty brutal though
The whole ZipDrive thing reminded me of that time in the olden days when I paid 15 to 20 bucks for 100mb disks after I spent hours getting a scsi card to work in a Windows 95 machine. I didn’t think the two were related.
The original was “packed with mag tapes”. Now it’s microSD cards.
I’m sure there are no potential security implications to making your computer’s drive accessible over the Internet. Nope, definitely not.