A real-life use case for SugarSync

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October 8th, 2009 - Posted by Kent

One of the nice things about testing online services is that sometimes they really come in handy while you're testing them. Over the last few weeks I've had some friends in town from Germany. They were so captivated by California that they easily filled up the 2GB of storage on their camera's memory card before their trip was half done. I offered to let them put the photos on my Mac, then we'd burn them to CDs.

Only it didn't happen quite like that. There were cable cars to catch and cocktails to be had. We got the photos backed up on the Mac, but never quite got the CDs burned. Later, with our friends back in Germany, and the photos still in San Francisco, we needed an ingenious solution that didn't involve four CDs and the Deutsche Post. It came in the form of online backup provider SugarSync.

I downloaded the SugarSync client at home (though I could have just used the web interface). I dragged the photos over to the proper folder. Once the photos were uploaded I chose to share the folder. I was given a unique url for the location of the photos that I emailed to my friends in Germany. They can now download them at their leisure. And I actually did the last two steps on my iPhone, while waiting for the bus.

SugarSync is not the only service we reviewed that allows online sharing. You can read our reviews and check out our comparisons here.