CloudHQ was good, got better - Review

review 23 Dec 2012

CloudHQ (the link has a referral that gives you, and me, one month free premium) is cloud synchronization/backup service, which recently added SkyDrive as another supported cloud. So, what it it good for? I’ll describe what I use it for.

Goodbye Dropbox client

A while back I decided to move all my files from Dropbox to Google Drive. Basically, because Google Drive was much cheaper. I still use Dropbox though, mainly because everybody else still does too and I need to share files with them. However, I didn’t want to have two sync clients running on my machine.

Enter CloudHQ: I setup Google Drive and Dropbox in CloudHQ and created a two-way sync rule to keep a folder named dropbox in my Google Drive in sync with the root folder of Dropbox. Whenever someone shares a file with me via Dropbox, it appears on my Google Drive’s dropbox folder. If I want to share a file with them, I just need to put in the same folder. In my machine, I just have the Google Drive sync client running. I know I lose the ability to use Dropbox Finder (I use a Mac) integration, but I didn’t use those function much anyway so doing them through the browser is not that much of a hassle.

Peace of mind

I’m currently doing my PhD, and I keep a folder with all relevant data. That folder is already on Google Drive so it’s quite safe (besides being on the cloud, my Google Drive is synchronized in another computer), but accidents happen. So I decided to back it up to another cloud service. Besides, I had subscribed to a 5Gb free SugarSync acount anyway, so I thought I would put it to good use.

I setup another sync rule in CloudHQ to sync my PhD Google Drive folder to a folder in my SugarSync account. Since this was just a backup, the sync rule is one-way only: CloudHQ propagates changes from Google Drive to SugarSync only (not the other way around).

You never know…

I also use Evernote a lot for various things, including my PhD, so it became a critical service in my digital life. Since I also had subscribed to a free Box account (I actually got a 25Gb account on a promotion) which was not being used for anything else, I decided I should backup Evernote into it.

I created another one-way rule from Evernote to Box. Evernote notes can be converted to various formats during backup: pdf, doc, google docs, text, and enex.

CloudHQ

So, CloudHQ is a cloud synchronization/backup service. It now supports the folowing services:

• Google Drive
• Dropbox
• SugarSync
• Box
• SkyDrive
• Evernote
• Salesforce
• Basecamp

It supports two-way or one-way synchronization and multiple acounts. They have various billing plans (I’m currently on the Premium plan), which differ mainly on the number of synchronization rules and number of accounts per service that you are allowed to have.

Problems

I have been using CloudHQ for about half a year now and the main things I think could be improved in the service are:

• Better real time activity reports - CloudHQ have a delay in the synchronization process, which is fine by me. The problem is that the delay is variable and you never know when a file will be synched. It would be nice to have an admin console that showed you the file queue and estimate synchronization time for each file.
• Better webpage - The usability of their webpage, both public and personal areas, is terrible…
• Better reports - CloudHQ gives you synchronization reports, but I would like to have more detailed reports. I really like how Dropbox does that with the Events page. I think something similar could work for CloudHQ.

Final remarks

I really like CloudHQ. I think it’s a great service that allows you to take advantage of those various free/or paid cloud storage services, putting them to good use, without you having to have a dozen clients running on your machine.