What happens to the data when an online storage site closes?

There was an interesting post on PC World recently that asks the question “What happens to the data when an online storage site closes?”. After all two of the main reasons for offline storage are for backup and for access.
What we are starting to see happen in the world of online storage is consolidation and of course the non sustainability of ‘free’ business models. As the article states, “Online storage services that have announced closings in the past ten months include big names in tech: AOL (Xdrive and AOL Pictures), Hewlett-Packard (Upline), Sony (Image Station), and Yahoo (Briefcase). Plenty of lesser-known online storage firms also have kicked the bucket, including Digital Railroad and Streamload MediaMax, which turned into The Linkup.”

One of the reasons we never used proprietary storage services for SMEStorage is that, ultimately, it is very difficult to keep up with the big guys in terms of price. Just look at Amazon. They are the 1oo pound gorilla of being able to sell at a high volume for low margin.

At SMEStorage we have concentrated on providing interoperability with best-of-breed Storage providers and building value services over and above this. For example things such as clients for different platforms, integrations with the best-of-breed Web 2.0, Desktop and social media tools. Innovations such as Email-backup-to-storage, and the ability to move data about from one storage provider to another. Or even have a real-time Cloud Data Backup which, if the primary provider disappears, will have kept the data in sync and available with a secondary provider. Key to this is that you own your data, not us.

If you are using our free Amazon S3 service we give you 250MB, but even using these you are free at any time to export it to any other provider you want at any time, including our other free services such as email-as-a-cloud or gmail-as-a-cloud, but of course you still own the account and therefore the data.

We believe that the most valuable thing is your data and we will keep doing all we can to help you keep it safe, accessible, and available.

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New workflow rules for SME Cloud Files

We’ve added some new workflow features for cloud files access through SMEStorage. You can now be notified of auto-updates if certain characteristics of a file changes.

The way this works as follow:

First click on the folder that you want to base your worfklow rules on:

Workflow Rules

Now Click on the Groups Tab and you will see some new icons, one of which lets you add some auto-sharing workflow rules.

workflow2

Once you click on this you will invoke the workflow editor. From here you can choose to add details about the file(s) that you want to monitor and to which part of the file this applies to i.e. the filename, extension or description. You can see from the screenshot below that the ‘MyDocs’ folder we selected earlier is used as the base container for the rules. Additional to this you can decide whether the rules only apply to this folder or also include sub-folders of ‘MyDocs’.

Worfkow3

Whenever any new files or changes to files are made that invoke the rule, you will be notified. For example if you choose to monitor all files that have the extension .doc, when a new doc files is uploaded to a folder you will be notified. Alternatively you could be monitoring any file title that has the word “scan” in it’s title. Again as soon as anything is uploaded in this folder (or sub-folders) that has the word scan then you will be notified.

If you work in teams and want to be notified when others amend files or upload new files then you should find this functionality useful.

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