Should You Join A Startup?

4 Factors to Consider in today's Sucky Environment

There are many reasons to join a startup. It’s mostly an individual assessment, so let’s look at the reasons from my perspective at odrive to help you make the right decision.

Personality

If you are looking to escape the doldrums of large company work life, then a startup may be for you. You will not be just a cog in the wheel at a startup. Your work matters, and hopefully the stuff you’re making will make an impact.

On the other hand, the excitement can quickly turn into chaos. There will be little process established. If you are someone who needs to have everything in its place, “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed, a startup may not be for you.

You don’t just execute a game plan. Often, you are the plan so you need to quickly learn from your mistakes and make them part of your body of experiences to draw from. You have to think on your feet. You have to be a creator.

People often refer to this person as having a “builder’s mindset.” You look to create systems and repeatable assets. You anticipate for scale, and discount one-offs. A builder is probably the most valuable trait to have on a startup team, though you don’t necessarily need an entire team of just builders.

One trait that everyone on the early startup team must have? Resiliency.

You must know that shit rolls downhill most of the time. You must know that you will fail much more than you succeed. You must know that the odds are stacked against you.

And against all that dreary knowledge, you must know that your belief in what you’re building is worth the risk.

Money

Let’s get this out of the way. Chances are, you are not going to cash in your equity for a big payday. First, the probability for any startup to succeed is terrible. On the flip side, the probability of a startup failing is great!

Then, even if a startup survives and reaches an equitable event like an IPO or acquisition, your share of equity will have been diluted greatly by venture capital.

For you to hit the jackpot, you must have been an early employee, stuck around for the exit, and the company is a mega hit.

In other words, you should not consider your options as a path to riches. You’d better have other reasons to go the startup route.

We here at odrive are riding in a different boat as we are self funded, so we expect the runway to success to be a little longer than others. However, we take nothing for granted and are putting the pedal to the metal.

Professional Growth

Bydefault, you will be wearing multiple hats.

If you’re a non-engineer, you’ll likely move from one role to the next as needs require and as the company changes. You’re also likely to take on multiple roles at the same time. I’ve had roles in sales, business development, partnerships, and content marketing. Oh, I’m also General Counsel.

If you’re an engineer — congrats — you’re a full stack engineer! You’ll work in front end development, backend, web, mobile — the whole shebang.

If you stay on just long enough, you also will take on management responsibility. This doesn’t mean you have been promoted to manager, just that you will take on management responsibility over those who’ve joined the company after you.

If you stay on long enough, you will become highly trusted and highly dependent on. Your fingerprints will be everywhere. You’ll be indispensable, so much so that you are irresistible to recruiters looking for someone just like you. Your options will have opened up to both larger startups and traditional companies.

Your startup experience is portable. You can take it with you wherever you go, and it will serve you well. Indeed, working anywhere else will seem like a piece of cake.

Build something amazing

This is the one. Your raison d’être for being at a startup. All the other reasons are surface, and can be obtained elsewhere.

You HAVE to want to build amazing and find meaning in what you’re building. You HAVE to want to achieve mega growth.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of speed bumps and landmines on the road to mega growth and amazing.

• Failure to find product/market fit
• Run out of money
• Big companies are chasing after your market
• Other startups are racing you to the market

From a personnel standpoint, the biggest roadblock is not making progress or the perception that not enough progress is being made towards the ultimate goal.

Ping pong tables and snacks help a little, for a short time. Then, there has to be perceptible progress.

Your people have a shelf life.

They can put up with a lot but they want to make sure you’re on the right trajectory, even if it’s not yet a hockey stick.

So do you still want to join a startup? I have painted a very hard and unlikely road to success. It’s not for the faint of heart.

I have been at six startups. Two are defunct, and three are still hanging on.

I’m a little older, a little wiser. I still believe.

These days, you can find me still chasing the startup dream at odrive.

Startups Shall Inherit The Earth

Startups innovate, Big companies follow

For so long, odrive has been beating the same drum.

Cloud storage is great — especially when it’s unlimited — but it is not usable or effective unless you have the right sync model.

More specifically, you needed to have a Progressive Sync model that enables users to sync down what they want, as they want it. And then Unsync what they no longer want.

The primary culprit was the amount of local computer storage.

It will never keep up with what you want stored in the cloud.

Until the last couple months, we had been beating that drum — alone. The silence was deafening.

That all changed in April when Google announced the release of Selective Sync which allows users to deselect folders from syncing to their desktop and thus freeing their local computer storage:

Google finally recognized that:

“there’s a good chance your computer’s hard drive will run out of space if you sync everything.”

Just last week, Dropbox announced Project Infinite:

We responded to it. We straight-up called out what our users knew to be the truth: it was a copycat, right down to the logo.

We were not angry. We were not scared. We are not newbies at this.

Did we get nervous? I would be lying if we did not take some time out to assess what we should do.

The final analysis: this is freakin’ awesome!

A market is born

This is the moment we have been waiting for. We knew that we had created awesome technology but wondered whether it was the classic tale of a great technology that did not solve a problem — or a problem of only a few.

Our hearts and minds were telling us that we were solving problems faced by everyone using cloud storage: how to unify the fragmentation of your apps and clouds, how to easily access it, share it, and then protect. Our users were telling us the same:

I have a @Dropbox @googledrive @onedrive and @AmazonCloudNet storage. How do I manage them all? I use @odrive of course! Try it! #Cloud

— mdjasrie (@mdjasrie) April 23, 2016

But where was the competition?

Then came Google’s announcement, and then Dropbox’s. They finally got the religion that cloud storage requires better sync because, among other things, local disk storage is limited.

This is good. No, great.

We can’t be the only one to push the market. More competition validates the market and our vision.

Are we Sparta?

You’ve all seen the movie 300, right? In the Battle of Thermopylae, a Spartan force of 300 led by King Leonidas fight valiantly to hold off a Persian army of over 100,000, but ultimately are killed. Their battle did help the Greek forces to beat back the Persian invasion.

No doubt, Google and Dropbox have larger armies. Without saying outright the size of our company, let’s just say that King Leonidas would have preferred his numerical inferiority.

We are not here for a moral victory. We are not here to let someone else win the game and memorialize us with a plaque or a movie. We are here to win.

The Startup shall inherit the earth

It is the law of technology nature.

Large companies once had good ideas but no longer innovate. They have established a business model that generates revenue and profits. They get bigger by getting bigger distribution.

For startups, many die but the few that survive will win because of ideas — and execution of those ideas into a market.

As the startup achieves market success, the larger company may try to do what the successful startup is doing. They throw endless resources and people to duplicate the technology and catch up. It’s not that easy. It’s a losing proposition.

The large company never sees the market as a problem to solve. It’s just business. Its engineers are not the ones driving the development; it’s the sales executives.

Startups follow their gut. Large company engineers follow specs.

odrive will win because we already have the future — today — while others are trying to build it and catch up.

We are nimble and fierce. We are experts at what we do. This also happens to be all we do — make the cloud better for all of us.

Let the giants come play in our backyard.

Come join our fight!

Facebook Has All My Pictures!!!!!!

Now get them all back

I am your typical Facebook user. I’m active some times, and can drop off completely off the face of the earth at other times… only to be pulled back in by some sneaky notification or curiosity gets the best of me.

When I’m active, I post quite a few pictures. Even when I’m not active, I can count on my friends to tag me in pics.

For some reason, I don’t give much thought to where all these pictures go. Somewhere in Facebook heaven… or graveyard?

Of course, I know the pictures are all sitting on a Facebook server farm but I don’t really think of the pictures as mine.

But I should — we all should.

There’s an app for that

This is a bigger problem than just Facebook. It’s all your apps like Instagram, Slack and Hipchat, for example. It’s where we spend most of our time. Apps connect with us at specific points of relevance — where we take pictures, talk to our friends, collaborate with teammates, etc.

Apps drive the growth of data more than anything else.

And yet, we don’t think of app storage as cloud storage, when in fact, it is as much cloud storage as Dropbox or Google Drive. There is no difference between storage that you buy and move content into, and storage that an app fills up.

I have more apps than I can shake a stick at. And yet I know I will adopt new apps in the future at an even faster clip.

With each app, my data sits in a different server farm somewhere.

How do we reclaim our data?

odrive can help.

Like this, if you want your data

Let’s take a look at my Facebook on my desktop. Facebook is a folder, along with my other apps and cloud storage — all on my desktop.

What is that photo? It was my high school yearbook photo that I posted on “throwback Thursday” as a profile picture. I made that post about two years ago.

I’m able to capture every photo and video I’ve ever posted to Facebook, and even pictures posted by friends who tagged me. Albums and timeline photos are automatically pulled together. Photos are organized by device.

Instead of browsing and scrolling through the Facebook interface, I can now easily find all my pictures on my desktop.

My pictures are now exactly where I want them to be. On MY desktop.

Of course, I will continue to post new pictures and videos to Facebook. And I will continue to use apps for different use cases.

While my data is everywhere, I also have them all in one place. In My odrive.

odrive is free to link to all your apps and storage. Get started today, get back control over all your data.

Is Your Cloud Storage Slow As Shit?

Meet the fastest personal cloud storage in the universe

Is Dropbox the fastest? Nope.

OneDrive? Not even close.

Amazon Cloud Drive? Uh-uh.

Google Drive? You’re getting warmer…

Give up?

Google Cloud Storage

That’s right folks. I’m not talking about Google Drive. I’m talking about Google’s infrastructure cloud storage.

But you said “personal cloud storage”.

That I did. Not too long ago I thought the same: Google Cloud Storage is not a service that every-day people can utilize effectively. But, it is a brave new world out there. Infrastructure cloud storage is no longer locked away behind an API, where Engineering and IT are the only keymasters. Today you can sync to Google Cloud Storage as easily as you do any other consumer storage. Better, in fact, because it is balls to the wall, blazing fast.

Ludicrous Speed.. Go!

So, how much faster is Google Cloud Storage? I am just completing a comprehensive performance analysis of Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Box, S3, and Google Cloud Storage in 7 different environments. Below are a few examples from a forthcoming post detailing my results. In terms of average upload speed, Google Cloud utterly destroys everything, across the board. I mean, it’s not even close.

When comparing average download speed, the competition heats up a bit, but Google Cloud still comes out on top, thoroughly trouncing a good number of the competitors.

The right tool for the job

Tapping into this blistering speed is easy. You need just one thing: odrive.

odrive overlays its progressive sync engine on top of a multitude of storage providers, including Google Cloud Storage. It strips away all of the complexities and restrictions, making storage that was previously thought of as inaccessible, now an exceedingly usable option for your personal cloud. You can sync, share, manage, and protect your data on the fastest storage available, if you like, without sacrificing a thing.

Storage for every occasion

Look at that! The cloud storage world just got a lot bigger. You now have the luxury of choosing storage according to your specific needs and use cases. You don’t have to lock yourself into the “prescribed” cloud storage choices, nor do you have to limit yourself to a single storage offering. Choose based on the merits of the storage, alone, and let odrive do the rest.

So, if you happen to be looking for the fastest solution around, it is available to you today with odrive and Google Cloud Storage!

Dropbox Infinite-ly Late To The Game

Dropbox’s Project Infinite is nothing new for odrive users

Dropbox made a breathtaking announcement today:

It’s revolutionary alright, but not new.

For odrive users, they have long understood the pains associated with accessing content locally on a machine that has limited storage when there is lots of content — and that odrive is the answer.

Dropbox is now adding virtual files like ODrive. Not a new invention they are late to the game. Already using... https://t.co/0v6bZ2rkQ0

— Paul Martin (@Hi_Profile) April 26, 2016

Dropbox's 'Project Infinite' will make you stop crying about your puny SSD https://t.co/zZ2YtWB9BD Actually, they are just copying @odrive

— Sean Filidis (@seanfilidis) April 26, 2016

As one tweet noted, it’s a copy right down to the logo:

@HuntHenning @ow interesting it has the same logo as @odrive

— Chris Barry (@ChrisW_B) April 26, 2016

We should not be surprised as we laid out the future for Dropbox in an earlier Medium article.

Perhaps we should be flattered, as the saying goes. We’re just glad Dropbox has decided to hop on to OUR revolution that was begun eons ago.

Of course, providing effective sync access to your unlimited cloud is not merely a project for us. It’s a mission. And it’s ready. Today.

Infinite access to everything under the Sun

The other thing that odrive users know is that we all use more than one cloud. Our stuff is everywhere, in multiple clouds, apps and storage. Fragmentation is a fact of life but you don’t need to fall victim to its sprawl.

You can use odrive for all your clouds under the Sun and on the Planet. This includes Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, Box — and even Dropbox so you don’t have to wait for their Project to be completed.

For a complete list of supported clouds, go here.

The cloud storage revolution — we’ve only just started.

If and when Dropbox Infinite does eventually come to fruition, it’s supposedly available only for subscribers to the Business edition.

To all other Dropbox users: No need to start a riot.

odrive is available to you now.

Join the revolution and get it now!

The Year Of Magical Sharing

How to finally share everything without it being a P.I.T.A.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to astound you and dazzle you. What if I were to tell you that you could have a folder — of anything — and that you can have that folder suddenly appear everywhere you want it to be. Voila!

Alright, I might be playfully overplaying my hand here but I really think that odrive is truly magical. Any storage you have — is turned into shared storage. Share what you already have — without uploading. Whatever you have in a folder — instantly shows up everywhere. And it’s ridiculously easy to set up.

You might think it magical, too, considering what is normally required to share your stuff.

Let me demonstrate with an event that we are all too familiar with — the family get-together.

It’s a family sharing-palooza

After the hugs, kisses and goodbyes, each family decamps back to their own lives. And then the flurry of pictures start flying across machines, across different apps (email, text, web links, etc.), and across the country.

Is this you?

• Some of your family are able to get pictures to you by email or text, but they end up buried in your email or phone storage.
• Some family members can not figure out how to share pictures and give up, so their pictures are stuck in their phones and camera storage.
• Someone “tech savvy” like Uncle Johnny tells everyone to send all the pictures to him who will then upload it all to his Dropbox and send out a sharing link. Doable, but requires a lot of coordination, competency, and lots of effort.
• Someone even more “tech savvy” — Aunt Sally — says she’ll set up a new, shared storage account and everyone can upload it there. Doable, but costly and still requires lots of coordination, competency, and significant uploading.

There must be a better way.

Now you see it… now you see it everywhere!

I have a folder of pictures stored in Amazon Cloud Drive labeled “Alex’s pics from BBQ” which were downloaded from my phone.

I have my BBQ pictures under a folder “Spring 2016 BBQ”.

I right-clicked on the folder and was able to kick off a share of that folder.

I send an email invite to Allison, Amanda, Aunt Cindy, Laura, Lauren, Nick, Ray, and Simon. After they accept the email invitation, they have the folder “Spring 2016 BBQ” on their desktop with all my BBQ pictures!

Just like that, everyone immediately saw my pictures on their own desktop.

If you have a folder, you can make it appear everywhere, out of nowhere, just like that.

Voila — bi-directional magic!

What happens next, you must experience.

My family members added their pictures to the same “Spring 2016 BBQ” folder.

Against my explicit instructions to add only pictures, my rebellious niece, Allison, defiantly added her music that she played during our family outing. Us older folk who grew up in the ’80s were happy that her collection included Depeche Mode.

The result is that I was able to create a two-way sharing experience with my family so that our pictures could be aggregated and organized with minimal effort.

The effect is a family that can stay in sync despite the distance.

Sharing storage the odrive way is magical not just for family gatherings. It can be used in work context where sharing is important like with teams and clients.

Let us know what magic you create.

Channel-As-A-Folder

How file sharing in Slack is transforming how teams work

It’s a thing. I’m calling it.

“Channel-as-a-folder.”

This was first coined by an odrive customer — the managing partner of a venture capital firm — who was using our Slack integration, along with several cloud storages like Google Drive.

We asked about his company’s workflows and he stated:

“[W]e are doing more and more of our doc transfers in slack channels. 
So the channel as a folder concept is interesting.”

This confirmed what I have surmised is happening in the workplace. Companies and teams are using messaging apps like Slack and Hipchat for file transfer more than any other apps — even ones that are bought for file transfer and even more than email.

I saw this question on Quora recently:

This growing trend makes sense. Files are transferred during team communications, when real-time discussions lead to many ad hoc file transfers. Relevant files and communications grouped together adds contextual value to the workflow. I wrote about this previously.

File sharing happens at the point of context.

The real kicker of Slack is the easy way you can make everything a channel. Take a look at the current view of my channels:

The common channels are what you’d expect: “marketing”, “general” and “product”. Ummm, “ramenclub”? I’m embarrassed to say that it’s a real channel, a very important one at that!

However, we also create a channel for every feature that is being worked on, every business issue that pops up. Really, anything that requires a group communication, boom, a new channel.

And for every channel, there is a folder.

Having all my channels as a folder is valuable to me because my file system is where I access and work on all my files. My Slack folders are sync’d to my team when we communicate in Slack. This workflow has helped me work better with my team.

How can you work less hard with Slack? Find out what value you get from having every channel-as-a-folder on your desktop.

It’s definitely a thing.

Are You Promiscuous With Cloud Storage?

Linking multiple accounts can be good for your business

I love cloud storage! Who doesn’t?

It’s plentiful and free. It’s safe even when you share a lot. It doesn’t judge when you upload all the stuff you wouldn’t want anyone to know you owned. It still loves you back when you ignore it until you need your stuff.

And you don’t need to be faithful to any one cloud storage. It does not play hard to get; it is easy to get some. You can try different flavors or even sign up for multiple accounts of the same flavor.

If you practice polyamory — love of multiple clouds — like I do, you know that such freedom of love comes with a price. It is a drag to browse and login to every account. It is an irritant to logout and login, one by one, over and over again. Having your content everywhere can give you pain in all the wrong places.

Lucky for me, I have odrive in my life.

One application, one login

As you can see, I am quite the flirt.

While a flirt, I also do not break up with my clouds. I have dated different clouds over the years depending on the use case and needs at the time. I’ve married some clouds whose values were very strong, while some others I just stayed in it because of the kids, I mean, data.

For one cloud — Google Drive — I have linked to two separate accounts, one for family and one for work.

There is really no limit how many accounts you link to, or which clouds. You can link to multiple Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive or Google. Some people do it to aggregate the free storage that comes with each account.

Many odrive users do it to run their business, smarter.

Learn to love to link a lot for business

If you are polyamorous in your business, you are likely drowning in data sorrow. odrive can turn your tears into joy.

@odrive You guys saved my professional life, thanks! I was juggling 8 different cloud storage accounts. Much love!

— Ventain (@Ventain) February 26, 2016

You may want to create a separate account for each client or per project. It is an easy way for businesses to create a secure sharing environment for each engagement.

Today, cloud is pervasive. It is easy to get but not always easy to use in a way that can drive up productivity.

odrive now makes the union of your business with all your clouds — a happy ending.

Get even more promiscuous today!

Completing The Slack Office Makeover

Add the missing ingredient for total Slack domination

We all know and love Slack for making work communication fun. It’s a messaging service for team collaboration, with heavy splashes of color, interrupting bots, and lots of emoji.

Beyond the design, it’s actually quite useful. Two things that stand out to me is that it’s far superior to (1) email and (2) meetings.

I hate email strings, not knowing what is attached, where it ends and picks up, and who is on the effing cc or bcc. Slack un-hides all of that, and places it in context for dynamic ongoing discussion and preserves for later historical recapture.

Slack also has reduced team meetings to almost zero, as team channels capture ideas and inspirations as they happen and as they develop. Less chit chat, more typing of what is relevant. When we do have live meetings, we often fill a team channel in advance of the meeting with documents and the agenda.

With both email and meetings covered in spades, Slack has become the digital office, except that it’s missing some really good filing cabinets.

---

Perhaps by accident or by design — for whatever reason — Slack is the place where we transfer files, lots of it, practically everything.

It makes sense that this is happening, because working around files is part of how teams work and Slack has brought down the barriers to how teams work.

In the past, you may have queued up an email and carefully considered the attachments; or, in preparation for an office meeting, you gathered documents together and printed out multiple sets for every attendee. With Slack, you just hit the “+” and add your file, in mid stream, in real time, in context, all the time.

Slack, however, does not manage files so well. And that makes sense, too, because Slack was designed for messaging, not files.

“A file is worth a thousand words”

Ok, I may have bastardized the old Chinese saying. But it’s true that files say a lot about what teams are doing or working on.

The problem with files in Slack is finding them, accessing them, and organizing them. This is where the odrive integration comes in to save the day.

Organized. You can directly access all your files in Slack channels and direct messages as individual folders on your desktop file system.

Direct access. You don’t need to download the files posted in Slack. You’ll find them on your local desktop, automatically and instantly.

Gallery view. You can take a gallery tour of a room that has tons of pictures for easy sorting.

Bi-directional sync. Unlike the British music sensation, our sync goes in Two Directions. If you add new files or make a saved edit, these will automatically post to your Slack channel or private message. This means that you and your team can stay *N Sync whether you are messaging in Slack or working locally on your files. (Sorry for the homage to boy bands).

What do you think so far?

We think the combination of odrive and Slack is so hot, like 98 Degrees hot. As a newly formed duo on the market, we may be the New Kids On The Block, but I can easily see odrive and Slack being used by every team, in every office, in every Backstreet. Boys and girls will love it! (can you tell we really love boy bands?)

If you haven’t yet, try it today as odrive is the Featured act in Slack’s app store: https://slack.com/apps

Stay tuned to this radio dial, because there is a lot more to come.

Slack’s API, documentation and integration team have been amazing, like with a capital “A”. Love them!

They quickly updated their API to accommodate a file handling method that we needed to make this magic. I feel that there is a lot more we can do to enhance the file experience with Slack.

So let us know what odrive and Slack can do together to make you less busy.

Sync Differently

Making effective use of unlimited cloud storage

Congratulations! You now have lots of cloud storage, maybe even unlimited cloud storage.

You’ve somehow been able to stuff as much your stuff into the cloud as you can. And why the heck not? Cloud storage makes your content shareable and safe. And it’s unlimited!

Sync is great, for a while

In terms of users, the most popular cloud storage today is Dropbox. It is popular largely because of one feature: sync. When a user drops a file into a Dropbox folder, it automatically goes up into the Dropbox cloud and is mirrored onto every device and machine of the user.

Sync is the perfect user experience when your content is up there (in the cloud), and you want it here (local) wherever you go (on all your devices and machines).

Sync seems like magic when your content is a trickle of photos or documents to share. It works like a charm; your content is everywhere.

When you add more content, the magic starts to sputter. Despite the hiccups and inconvenience, you soldier on because sync is still better than anything else and there’s no going back from cloud storage.

Once you got unlimited cloud storage, and move all your stuff into the cloud, you start learning that unlimited comes with a lot of limitations!

The user experience starts to fall apart, in the following ways:

1. Slow to initialize (startup experience)
2. Slow sync (ongoing experience)
3. Unreliable (lost or corrupted files)
4. Unresponsive (stuck)
5. Uncommunicative (no badging or indication of sync status)
6. Exhausted local storage (much smaller than your cloud storage)

This last one is a silent killer.

Running on empty

Very few people think about their local disk storage volume. It gets bigger all the time, and this is true for the most part on laptops and desktops, though not as much on smart phones and tablet devices. The effective storage is actually much less because much of the native storage is taken up by the apps and other processes running in your machine.

The effective vs. native storage narrative, however, doesn’t matter. The amount of local disk storage is not keeping up with the amount of data you are generating, nor with the amount of data you are pushing into the cloud. Not even close.

The inadequate local disk storage does matter with sync — at least traditional sync like Dropbox’s sync engine. Files are copied to every machine running the Dropbox client software.

What’s the problem? Let’s say you have 1 TB of content in the Dropbox cloud, and you have the Dropbox client software on your company desktop machine in the office and on your personal laptop. This means that you must have at least 1 TB of effective local disk storage on each of your machines, in order for you to access your data locally.

Not many people have that much local storage. A new laptop these days typically has 250 GBs. My laptop has 120 GBs. Those are total storage numbers.

Ruh roh? Yes, Scooby.

Selective Sync relieves the symptom

One solution to the local disk storage problem is “Selective Sync,” where only certain file content is local while everything is in the cloud.

Dropbox’s implementation of Selective Sync requires a user to pick the top level folders to sync from its web client console.

There are a couple of fundamental problems with this implementation. One, the user needs to pre-declare what to make local and what to hold back. This requires the user to know what is in the folders, at any given time, even as the content of the folder changes and the need to files change. Two, this implementation defeats the entire reason you love sync, which is that you can access all your content from every device.

At best, Dropbox’s selective sync mitigates the symptom but kills the patient.

Sync had to get better or the data explosion that is happening in this world will destroy the cloud experience.

Progressive Sync cures the patient

We, at odrive, wanted to build a sync engine that allows a user to have a native file experience to all content, of infinite size, with no constraints.

This is Progressive Sync.

Progressive Sync virtualizes the entire file system structure so that you expand or contract the view of your files and folders when you want it (bring to local) and when you don’t want it (remove from local but still accessible on demand).

The browsing is natural. You open a folder by double clicking on it, which then opens the contents of that folder. If you want to open a file, you double click on it and it downloads. If you see a subfolder, you double click to open it. Or any folder, really. And so on.

There are advanced features that allow you to configure the browsing and download experience, but you will naturally discover that enhanced experience when you need to.

When you are done working on the files or just want to free your local disk, you can unsync. Although the content is no longer local, it is still safely stored in your cloud storage waiting for you to double click its corresponding stub file, naturally.

A sync showdown

As you can see, the difference is stark and the choice is clear.

As you will feel, the improvement in user experience is dramatic.

The promise of unlimited is good again

So let me give you a snapshot of my local data life.

Here is a current view of my local file system, where I have some clouds in active use (signified by the folders with the check) and some that are completely off my computer (as signified by the pink tabbed folders).

Here is a current view of the storage on my Mac.

You wouldn’t know it but I actually have about a half TB of content in the cloud. The amount of content that I use locally at any point in time is a very small subset of my cloud content.

That is the brilliance of Progressive Sync — see everything but store as close to nothing as you want — locally.

It’s a beautiful day in my datahood

How do I keep my data world sane and orderly? Here is a basic flow of my data experience from beginning migration to everyday management.

Step One. On day one, I migrated all my data from my local directories, phone and tablet to the cloud. My choice was Amazon Cloud Drive; I had purchased its unlimited cloud storage plan. Most of my content is made up of pictures and videos. I also have work files, which are interspersed in different clouds like Google Drive and Slack.

Step Two. After the data migration completed, I unsync’d everything so that I had only a zero-byte stub file locally, representing all my cloud content.

Step Three. At any time, I usually keep a single folder of working files local. I progressively sync down files as I need them; I leave them local unless it’s a really large file in which case I unsync the file as soon as I’m done with that file.

Step Four. If I am working on a new project or require access to a new set of files, I find the folder of content I need and right-click and sync down all the files in the folder. When I am done with my task, I unsync the entire folder.

I consider myself an advanced but light user of the cloud. We hear of users on our forum who exceed 100 TBs of content. That sounds insane but that is probably closer to the average cloud user today and may very well be the new normal in a few short years.

Future proof your data storage needs with Progressive Sync — native file access to infinity.

Get to know how it feels to sync to unlimited everything today!

To read more about odrive sync: https://medium.odrive.com/unsync-is-the-missing-link-to-cloud-storage-539493c384c1#.cixvvel0d