Friday, April 27, 2012

Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Sync-Land ...

Just got my Google Drive.  Unlike Dropbox, its downloadable sync software doesn't support MacOS 10.5.x (Leopard). Only 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or higher. Which makes it considerably less exciting.

On the sunny side, just having it prompted me to finally get around to cleaning up my Google Docs hoard. Had stuff in there that I hadn't looked at (for good reason) in years.

Addenda, instead of a new post:


April 28: David Murphy at PC Magazine lists the service's "six substantial slip-ups." The big one for me, already mentioned above but I'm gonna elaborate anyway, is "cross-platform support."

Yes, I know it's silly to whine about newer programs not supporting your older OS, but in the case of sync software, the further back it reaches the better, because one great use for it is making it easy to port important files from old machines to new ones.


Google Drive apparently supports Windows all the way back to XP, which was released in 2001, but only covers MacOS X back to Snow Leopard (10.6.x), which was released in 2009. I'm running Leopard (10.5.x), which only dates back to 2007, and can't use Google Drive to sync.

Linux? Per PC World, Google says it's on the way due to considerable and semi-organized bellyaching ...

But hey, Dropbox already has me covered on both both my Leopard Mac Mini and my Linux laptop. Maybe even my Android tablet (Dropbox needs 2.1; I may be stuck at 2.0), if it survived the hailstorm we just had. I left it in the tent this morning, but we took a pounding -- the television guy says baseball sized, but it looked closer to golf ball sized to me.


So anyway, I'm glad to have another five gigs of online storage available, but I just don't see using anything but Dropbox for syncing, at least as long as they continue to offer a wider range of support for OSes/versions.
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