These days there seem to be a never-ending number of cloud-based services for stashing your data. Depending on what you need from a service, whether it’s purely backup, file syncing, or even collaborative working, chances are there’s a service to suit you.

Working as I do from more than one location, using more than one computer, it’s important for me to be able to easily access my files where ever I am that particular day, whether I’m in the office or on the road.

Over the last couple of years I’ve tried a whole range of different options. Usually they’ve been based around using SFTP or Amazon S3 space mounted as a local drive, for which I’ve tried ExpanDrive, MacFusion, JungleDisk, and ZumoDrive.

Overall they all worked pretty well, but generally suffered the same problem, and that is one of speed. This is the one big problem with cloud storage – that accessing it (in a useful way) requires a pretty fast network connection. Upload speeds are meagre in comparison to download speeds, so copying stuff onto the “drive” often meant a long standing Finder window. Clever caching helps, but you just can’t get away from the problem.

Then there’s the problem of when your connection goes down, or you just plain don’t have one. Put simply – no network, no files.

That’s where Dropbox plays its trump card. Because whilst on the face of it Dropbox is just another cloud storage service, actually it’s not. It’s a file synchronisation service that uses the cloud to keep your files in sync, provides a remote backup of them, as well as offering web and iPhone access to them at the same time.

Sure, the backup and web access are commonplace, but it’s the syncing that is the magic. What happens to your files if you’re not online? Well, nothing. They’re still on your computer and you can still work with them. When you get back online they sync up without bothering you with the details.

But there is the rub. The files are actually always on your computer. With a hosted virtual disk, once you shut down those files aren’t there as the disk is unmounted (aside maybe from being in the cache), and from a security perspective that’s a good thing, but with Dropbox that’s not an option, as all you’re doing is using the cloud to keep your files up to date.

So is there anything we can do about that? As it happens, yes there is. Enter Espionage.

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