Mark Roddis

So for a long time the whole idea of a personal cloud has excited me. Something that just exists and that does not care where I am or what machine I am using.

So for the last few weeks I have been playing with a few of the Microsoft based offerings in this field to see how they fair.

So first off is Microsoft Live Sky Drive which is simply a 5GB drive on the Internet that you access via a browser. Not big, not clever but it is simple to use and is free. There are of course many other services out there that do exactly the same thing.

Then we have Microsoft Groove which is part of Office. Again simple to use in that you set up a folder on each PC you want to participate and then any data you put into that folder on one PC gets replicated to all other machines in the cloud. You also have the option to send messages and share folders with other people. Indeed you can set up a mini network for a project team in a matter of moments and again this works really well.

Finally we have Microsoft Live Foldershare which is currently still in beta. This is very much a lightweight version of Groove in that you select folders on each machine you want to include and anything you add to a folder on one machine gets replicated onto all other machines in the cloud. It is very quick, very easy and again, free.

So it is with Foldershare that I think we are closest to the true cloud idea but even thought I have running on my home desktop and my work laptop, I have no idea what to do with it.

After all, I don’t leave my work computer at the office. It’s a laptop and when not on the road, I work from home so my laptop is almost always with me. Indeed the only times I don’t have it to hand is when I am in a situation where I don’t have any PC to hand.

So what about when I am away from home?

Well when I am "on the road" it is rare I need stuff that is on my home PC. Sure my music collection and photo collection is on my home PC but I have never found myself in a situation where I need to get access to a certain photo or certain music file without delay. Indeed my music collection is over 150GB in size so to keep a synchronized copy on my 80GB laptop HDD could be interesting.

So I have my cloud and it works really well but I cannot for the life of me think of anything I want to keep in it.

So this then brings me onto the new Microsoft Mesh that was launched last week with a lot of noise. It looks like a combination of all of the other services but again I can’t think of what I would want to use it for.

Sure if it offered many hundreds of gigabytes of online storage then I could use it to store all my media files but such storage costs big money so is not part of the Mesh idea.

And for those people who use a desktop PC at work, do we really think their IT department will allow them to open up their work folders to the Internet?

So the whole cloud idea from a storage perspective is lost on me. The technology is cool and works well but why?