ilx consumer advice thread for THE CLOUD & music & storage riyl icloud google music dropbox netflix spotify

so it seems pretty clear at this point that sometime over the next five years most people will have moved from a local files model of computer music-listening (& movie-watching & data-storage & so forth) to a streaming/cloud model. this thread is to help us (me) sort through the different options, what works best, whats cheap, whats easy, etc.

is anyone planning on using icloud? for what? what about google music? (i am using google music right now and it works great except for a couple irritating things)

feel like we can include spotify/netflix and similar subscription services since its kind of the same concept: keeping media files off of yr local hard drive

one reason i ask is b/c i am saving up for a macbook air right now and the hard drives are (relatively) TINY--like 128GB on the lowest-end model. which would just barely fit my itunes library. and while im sure ill end up putting it all on an external (or two), id rather not be carting around the external HD every time i want listen to music

i'm interested in this thread too tbh -- i just signed up for icloud right now and am using spotify free, but i still don't know exactly how all of this fits together for me

yes. i am waiting for this to "fit together" and "just work" or whatever. i dont want to have to jury-rig some solution.

so far google music seems like the best (current) solution... pros: lets me upload all mp3s, including those of uncertain provenance, lets me listen from whichever computer, is free. neutral: interface is okay. cons: no iphone listening, have to have window open in browser, media keys dont work, have to install plugin to re-download yr mp3s

I was pretty stoked about the amazon cloud for music until I got cold feet regarding my rights to those files. are they gonna be able to turn me in if I can't document that I "own" those files? I dunno about any of that, but o/w it seems like a great deal; for like $20 a year (& free the first year if you buy any music from amazon, even a $5 mp3 album) you can upload an unlimited # of files. granted that's a pain in the ass, but so is my ridiculous replication of my 400+ gb of musica popular.

was excited about the apple thing but it's only for 25,000 songs...sigh...so I'd have to do the same bullshit I do w/ all my iDevices: pick & choose. so tired of that.

not feeling all of this, i r luddite

the thing that i am most interested/worried about is streaming music to play on my iphone--presumably thats the direction were headed in... but it means huge amounts of data usage, no listening on the subway, etc.

the one part of all of this i feel like i have figured out is the music stuff. i use spotify. it has a large percentage of the kind of stuff i listen to, and while i don't own an iphone now, i will eventually, and they have an iphone app w/ offline mode, so

i kind of never want to manage music files ever again tbh

you can stream from amazon cloud; can create a web app only at this point, but it works (I've done it my iPad). maybe amazon'll create a real app eventually.

no idea about how to manage data usage. I'm guessing that the expensive caps on data are gonna end eventually, probably when google and/or apple and/or I dunno replaces the whole dumb cell infrastructure in the USA.

i hope so! but im not optimistic--didnt the net neutrality ruling last year essentially allow telecoms the freedom to limit and throttle their data transfers

i don't have a laptop or iphone, but while at work i do stream music from my home computer using subsonic. it streams to phones as well.

i'm paying for spotify and for dropbox right now and i imagine google's document refix will change the atmosphere in a big way.
this is why we don't have any records of lost civilizations by the way: everybody puts their info in the cloud and then CONTAGION
superintelligent crickets will never know the joy of The Black Eyed Peas and it is the consumer's fault

this whole thing seems like "why own when you can rent"

like, i get that the direction is storing all of our content on servers outside of our possession, but lord what's the rush

"why rent when you can steal"

"why steal when cloud"

is anyone using itunes match yet

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/6/3224597/mat-honan-hacked-apple-icloud-google-twitter

actually: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/

i've given up on itunes match.

too many bad matches of shitty remix versions or what sounds like 64k resampled to 256, and gapless playback seems broken

gonna try again toward the end of my year

working pretty well for me so far! the only problem w/ matching ive encountered is the "clean version" thing

noticed any problems with gapless?

no not yet

: (

support sort of acknowledged sporadic problems, but didn't offer a fix

the cloud is the best name for any computer thing ever

having said that i have totally ignored icloud and itunes match and dropbox

i have too many files they cant deal w/all my files

i am pretty much at the match limit, but i figure they will raise it via moore's law

Amazon cloud just added matching =- nice 256k versions of my shitty ripped from youtube files

Best services for 'general' (docs, music, photos) back-up to the cloud? This would be belt and braces, with hard disk back-up in addition, and only for back-up rather than rich sharing features. Last time I looked was about 3 years ago, tried Mozy, it was hopeless - but recent reviews seem to suggest vast improvements? I guess Carbonite was the other contender back then.

highly recommend crashplan

which is great for backup but also has a pretty full featured mobile app and (I believe) web interface for retrieving and viewing files

im currently piggybacking on my dads plan, its a big lump sum up front but I think it's fairly cheap if you think of it as a month to month thing

Thanks, checking this out and will give the 30-day trial a go.

max, if I'm looking at a terabyte plus of data, crashplan works fine?

well, the initial upload will take forever, but once its up it only backs up the new and changed bits of data

i believe for a fee theyll also send you an external drive that you can back up to, and then send back to them

Well that's kinda what I'm doing now anyway so

I've got 1.4TB on CrashPlan. Took ~15 months for the initial upload. Painfully slow but otherwise flawless -- don't notice any drain on system resources, unlike Time Machine. I think my ISP may be capping my upload speed, so you might do better. I selected the more important folders (family photos and videos, documents) went up first, added the music folder only once everything else was captured.

15 months!!!

Yeah, painfully slow. Every similar service I've tried over the years has been similarly molasses-like, including Mozy and SugarSync. I think it's my ISP's fault, "high speed" internet doesn't mean much in Canada.

Crashplan took me about 2 weeks with 540 GB.

dropbox fuckin with it's copy link function?

I've got 1.4TB on CrashPlan. Took ~15 months for the initial upload

lmao is this for real

figuring out a cloud thing that will work with iphoto is a pain

http://thesweetsetup.com/apps/our-favorite-photo-stream-alternative/

thanks! might use that as a good backup for "what if your phone crashes / gets lost before you save your photos locally" but for all my past photos I think I'm just gonna use CrashPlan or Backblaze to mirror my hard drive. was considering Google or Amazon but it seems like the consensus is they don't sync well with iPhoto and might not be able to restore your library if your hard drive gets wiped. CrashPlan seems to say for sure that they can do that.

I'm starting to see how bad iPhoto sucks but the prospect of getting my zillion photos out of it and using something else is not appealing.

basically I'm not looking for a cloud photostream, I want a non-local backup of my whole iphoto library (which is huge)

i just back up my whole aperture library to crashplan. it didnt take THAT long to upload i dont think? a couple weeks at most? i dont remember how big the library is though

Does Crashplan let you listen to your music off of the cloud? If not, can someone recommend a cloud storage service where you can listen to your music directly from the cloud?

It doesn't. Just for back up.

there's backblaze too.

timely revive too because dropbox is having an event right now

well what do you know https://www.carousel.com

dropbox now 10USD/8GBP a month for a terabyte

It's a little cheaper if you pay by the year, $99

I've been using Dropbox for a while, and I love the simplicity of it, but I think it's ridiculous they only have one pay scheme. I don't need a terabyte of space, and 10 euros per month is too much. If I could have something like 200 GBs for 4 euros per month, I'd be fine with that.

How come I can stream WAV files directly from the Dropbox app but not from the Dropbox site?

is there a single product purporting to store yr eg docs reliably across android, windows devices and online that isnt a total fucking misery to use

why are they pushing the "dropbox app" i literally thought the WHOLE POINT was that they just act like normal files in a "magic" folder using your own file system. GAHH

probably 'the people from marketing' focus-grouped it and decided potential customers know what an app is and are comfortable with them, but they are puzzled by and a bit fearful of magic folders

i realise this is a really dumb question but if someone shares a dropbox folder with me and i choose 'add to dropbox' it plonks it into my dropbox 'home' i.e. root directory. after a couple of years of this i have an absolutely ungodly number of totally unrelated folders there. so i thought - hey, this is just MY view of these folders. i can create a bunch of umbrella folders for these things and organise it, right?

right? can i do that? i realllly don't want to fuck up my colleagues' folder heirarchies.

i realise this is a bone-simple question that probably proves i don't know how dropbox works but idk this thing is out of hand

https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/leave-shared-folder

hmm don’t want to remove anything necc - just sort into my own folder structure

Oh I see. No I think if you reorganise stuff there’s two way sync. They’ll be out of business in 5 years though so i wouldn’t worry about it.

Yeah, Google Drive's general wack-ass file structure is better in that regard, everything's just a symlink anyway

lmao caek why do you say that

(thanks for the reassurance about my reorg - i’m goin in)

lmao caek why do you say that

(thanks for the reassurance about my reorg - i’m goin in)

Haha oh shit

So “add to my Dropbox” has one function, which is to put it in a giant flat directory of every folder anyone has ever shared with you?? seems mental

I’m not sure if you’re talking about moving the top level shared folder (which I think is fine) or moving stuff inside the shared folder (which I think will affect the owners view).

when you get added to a dropbox folder you get an email notification that when clicked takes you to the web view of that folder. there’s a big button that says “add to dropbox”, which is what you need to do unless you want to go to that webpage every time. i think there’s also an option to download to disk. anyway, when you “add to dropbox”, it puts that shared folder into your root dropbox directory. the one you see if you click the “dropbox” icon that dropbox adds to your sidebar, etc. THOSE are the folders i’d like to organise. don’t wanna move or rename my home dropbox folder. just the ones inside it.

literally every time i type “dropbox” it says “dripbox” o help me lawd

lol to be clear i don’t want to rename them! just move em around inside a few folders i’ve created in that top level.

When I’ve added shared folders they’ve shown up as subfolders of ~/Dropbox/shared or ~Dropbox/public or something. I don’t think there’s anything stopping you moving the folder they shared with you to somewhere else inside ~/Dropbox. It might be worth trying to do it in the web ui though. Maybe more obvious what works of you view from there.