20 December 2012

Dropbox v Cubby

Logmein has released Cubby, a cloud and distributed file storage and sharing product.

I've been a beta tester of Cubby for quite some time, and for most of that time I saw no particular benefits over Dropbox. After a few days use of the production version I can summarise my thoughts quite quickly.
  • Cubby and Dropbox are extremely similar, but there are two key advantages to Cubby...
  • Cubby offers peer to peer synchronisation, much like Windows Live Mesh does/did (it's closing soon). That means that two separate PCs/Macs can synchronise the contents of folders without storing the files anywhere online. That can reduce costs and provide a bit more privacy.
  • Material in Cubby can, by default, be accessed by Cubby personnel (but they promise not to unless they have to). However, unlike Dropbox, you can turn on encryption on a folder-by-folder basis so that even Cubby can't get to your documents.  You might infer that law enforcement authorities can't either, but there is a growing body of law in Australia and the USA that suggests that a court can order you to give up passwords.
Like Dropbox, Cubby has iOS, Android, OS X and Windows clients.

So, it's a bit better than Dropbox, but I won't be switching over to it for one huge reason - at the moment you can't edit documents on a mobile device and have the edits synchronise back to your other machines. When that is sorted and more mobile apps can interact with Cubby I will take another look.


© 2012 Andrew Calvin, Sydney

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