Hands on: ZumoDrive Lets You Access Your Files Easily, From Anywhere
ZumoDrive lets users store music, image and other files in the cloud, and then stream them onto netbooks, laptops and smartphones.
Fri, April 02, 2010
Computerworld — If you've got a notebook, a netbook and/or a smartphone, it can be real pain to access your photos, music and other files from all these different systems. One way to take care of this -- short of setting up your own server -- is via Zector's ZumoDrive .
Slideshow: From Paper Tape to Data Sticks: The Evolution of Removable Storage
How does it work? Unlike some other online storage services, which work completely through your browser, ZumoDrive has you install a client application onto your Windows, Mac or Linux -based system. On a Windows PC, at least, the client looks like a regular network drive (labeled Z:) with four folders labeled Music, Documents, Pictures and Linked Files; you can rename, delete or add to the folders, as with any hard drive.
You copy or move any files that you want to be able to access from, say, your netbook or smartphone by dragging and dropping the files into the relevant folder. You can also right-click on any folder and click on the Link folder to ZumoDrive menu selection. You are actually uploading those files to a ZumoDrive server, which, according to the company, is hosted by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) .
Once stored, the files can then be streamed to your various devices, so you can access them without having to use the device's own limited storage space.
What's cool about it? Currently, ZumoDrive supports the iPhone, Android devices and Palm webOS phones. I tried it on my Android-based Motorola Droid, and was quite impressed with how smoothly I was able to play my music files -- I played several different songs in the space of an hour, and there were no pauses of the type I occasionally get with other streaming services. I was also able to access images and documents without any problem.
You do have to allow sufficient time to upload your files initially; if you're uploading several gigabytes of music, it's going to take some time, depending on the speed of your connection. For example, a folder containing 73.4MB of .wma music files took me about 18 minutes to upload.
ZumoDrive also takes into consideration the idea that you might not always be online. When you view the content, the file is cached locally, so that you can access it again without a connection if you need to. At least, you can on most devices; the Android and Palm apps, which came out just recently, only let you cache documents and not music or video files.
