End of the school year means that 300 people are desperately backing up their work before dropping their laptops into the IT department for reimaging.  All staff and students are asked to bckup their own work, even though laptops use mobile accounts to sync data.  However, students and staff are sometimes not aware at the number of options available for online backup.

We’ve been suggesting free Mozy accounts for backup for around 18 months now, but SugarSync seems like a better option.  SugarSync works on Mac, PC and mobile devices; allows users to select specific folders to backup; give 2Gb of free online backup, which should be plenty for most users; and even allows web sharing of files and folders.

One of the few problems with the free offering from SugarSync is that accounts can only be synced with two devices, but for most people that shouldn’t create any issues.

Rumour has it that Google may finally release GDrive in May 2009 and that it may combine with Google MyStuff.  Now that cloud computing is becoming ubiquitous (we’re hoping that every Transition Year student will have a me.com account to go with their new Macbooks in September), it would be a perfect time to launch such a product.

With GDrive/MyStuff (as with Apple’s me.com), users would be able to move most or all of their storage requirements off the desktop and into the cloud.  Users do this all the time anyway – email on Gmail, photos on Flick or Picasa, documents on Google docs etc. – but Gdrive/MyStuff (we can assume) would let users do all of this automatically and (probably) in one place.  And as with me.com, chances are there will be a drag and drop option and an auto sync option so that all of your stuff is available from any connected device at any time.

In the meantime, Gspace is a simple plugin for Firefox that lets you use your free 7Gb of Gmail storage for storing other stuff.