ON SHARPCAST'S PHOTO SYNC SERVICE

HANDS OFF MY BACKUP

Walt Mossberg has a positive review of a photo syncing service by Sharpcast, which apparently makes syncing and backing up photos (for now) easy amongst various PCs, the web, and cellphone/PDAs. 

While I haven't tried the service itself yet, I'm in violent agreement with Walt on the need for better tools for mainstream consumers to sync and back up all their digital stuff.  As Walt describes it:

"As more people acquire multiple computers and high-end cellphones, one of the biggest problems they face is synchronizing important files among all of these devices, and ensuring they have backup copies.

Inside big corporations, these tasks often are handled by internal networks, which store files centrally and back up computers nightly. But consumers have had to resort to time-consuming and imperfect methods. These include emailing files to themselves, manually synchronizing their phones and computers, and manually copying files among their computers.

Over the next year or so, I expect that one of the big trends in personal technology will be the introduction of services and products that make this job easier.

Both Google and Microsoft are reportedly preparing new services that will back up all of a consumer's data to their servers.

Apple already offers a service called .Mac, which, for $99 a year, gives consumers storage space on an Apple server, allows backups to that remote server and synchronizes selected data among multiple Macs.

And Microsoft has recently acquired a small service called FolderShare, which I reviewed last year, that can synchronize and back up selected folders on any mix of Windows and Macintosh computers."

Regular readers of this blog know my focus on services in this area, including raves for services like Google Sync, and Foldershare, and rants for Apple's .Mac (aka dotMac).

On a cursory examination of the Sharpcast website, it looks like the service is being positioned more around it's Sync features than it's Backup capabilities.  In fact, the focus seems to be on making the Sync stuff as "automagical" as possible.  Here's how Walt describes it:

"With Sharpcast Photos, any change you make to an album of photos on one of your devices is replicated within seconds on your other devices. If you add a photo to an album on your PC, it shows up within seconds on your phone and on your Sharpcast Web page.

If you rotate a photo on the phone, the same photo is rotated within seconds on the PC and Web page. If you delete a photo on the Web page, it's immediately deleted on the PC and the phone. And if you take a photo with the camera on your Sharpcast-enabled phone, it will show up in seconds on your PC and your Web page."

As a user with thousands of digital photos on almost a dozen PCs (both Windows and Macs), along with several sets of network drives, I can attest to the need for keeping things in sync.

However, I'd like to understand the rules behind the automagical Sync stuff, explained up-front for mainstream users.

I may be wrong, but in it's current version of the Sharpcast software, it seems that it's all to easy to tweak a photo on my Treo phone, and permanently change the main copy in the backup archive.

Mainstream users first need to be assured (whether they ask for it explicitly or not), that their original copies are going to be guarded like the crown jewels of England.  Any changes and tweaks should apply to copies only, so that the user has the ability to revert back to the original at any time before a tweak or a Sync.

This may sound obvious, but it's an easy core feature to miss, when the initial focus is on the cool implementation of the sync and sharing features.

I'll check Sharpcast out to see how it handles the distinction.

Comments

[Gibu Thomas]

Michael,

Thanks for your comments.

Regarding your concern about the backup of your photos being treated like the crown jewels of England, we are in violent agreement with you as well.

We never touch your originals on your hard-drive. The first thing we do when you import pictures to the app is to replicate those files fully to a remote server, so it is preserved even if your hard drive crashes (in the beta software, you have to set your preference to do this, otherwise a compressed version is what is synced, but that will change in future versions to the way I described it above).

From then, any changes you make are made to your view within the application. So, if you rotate an image on your mobile, that is reflected on the web and on the desktop, but the underlying image on your PC file system and the back up on our servers are preserved as it originally was until you explicitly export the 'modified' version from the app or the website (the timing of the 'export full-res' functionality is tied to the 'automatic sync of full-res' functionality in the next couple of months).

The solution is also not positioned as a sync solution. It is an all-in-one solution for your syncing, sharing, remote access and backup problems. Our belief is that consumers should not have to search for point solutions for each of these problems separately. Similar to an Exchange server, Sharpcast leverages its brand of a universal, multi-way, instant sync as an all-in-one solution to all those problems. Back up is syncing to a remote server. Sharing is syncing to someone else. Anywhere access is syncing to a remote server, etc.

Also, it is not just the files that are backed up, it is also the meta-data. So, to recover your entire collection on a brand new PC, all you have to do is install the app and log in as yourself. Your entire workspace, with your photos, captions, album organization, everything will be automatically recreated there, sort of like installing Outlook on a brand-new PC at work. So, it is an amazing backup solution -- a back up solution where you don't have to think or do the work and even the tiniest changes are automatically and incrementally preserved.

We think this user experience is the future. It is very experiential, similar to the transition from a VCR to a Tivo. And Photos is just the beginning for us. Someday, before we are done, you will be able to focus on just creation and consumption of any form of digital data, without worrying about the cumbersome management, regardless of how many devices you have or regardless of whether you are online or offline.

I would be curious to hear your feedback after you try out the app.

Thanks Michael,

Cheers,

Gibu Thomas
CEO, Sharpcast