I’m finding myself attending more and more meetings these days and need to ensure that this doesn’t affect our busy schedule which in turn affects our client’s projects. I’ve always prided myself on providing clients with great service and so it’s a priority that while I’m away from the office, that there is someone at EdenWeb covering for me, continuing the design work and able to respond to support questions.
Next month we’re officially starting to work with a talented young designer based in Scotland (more about him soon - big clue in post title!) who will be helping me out and adding some extra ‘bandwidth’ to EdenWeb. The most immediate issue was how best to share our design files without losing work or having multiple copies of files floating round between us (my number 1 pet-hate).
Originally I’d been searching for a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device which in theory could be left hooked up to the internet even when my PC is offline. Matt would then be able to access any files he needed and we could ping-pong files without having to use email.
I’ve since gone off this approach slightly as I’m finding such hugely varying reviews of all the major vendor’s offerings and am instead considering sharing and storing some files through an online backup service.
Tonight I stumbled upon Box.net who do just that.
I signed up for a free test account and have to say I am very impressed with the usability and features of their service. I can very easily create folders for each client, upload files (17MB took only a minute or so on cool drag-and-drop feature) and assign users with sharing privelages. There’s even a desktop client available which will sync at specified times
Yes, Google are planning on rolling out a new service called gDrive which offers remote file back up and yes, they will have a huge budget for servers and most likely offer this service for free but the issue here is reliability, security and uptime. If Box.net or any other services I’ll be testing can tick all those boxes then it’s worth paying for this service.
It’s also nice to support the smaller guys. Nice informal, yet informative blog available too.
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