Blog de Toxifier: Copy.com cloud storage Review

Hey all my dear readers! :) I hope you all are doing great! :D See I kept my words as per my last post! :P

You guys do know what cloud storage is, right? Rather you know what Cloud is, correct? o.O er, NO? Chill, we will discuss that first then! :)

What is Cloud/Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage

Of course not the one that hides the sun, or rains down -_\ Right now we are discussing about the computer term, Cloud. We rather use the term Cloud Computing to be precise and specific. Cloud computing is a colloquial expression used to describe a variety of different computing concepts that involve a large number of computers that are connected through a real-time communication network(one of the most widely used such network is Internet). Cloud computing is a jargon term without a commonly accepted non-ambiguous scientific or technical definition. In science, cloud computing is a synonym for distributed computing over a network and means the ability to run a program on many connected computers at the same time. The popularity of the term can be attributed to its use in marketing to sell hosted services in the sense of application service provisioning that run client server software on a remote location.

The necessary thing to understand here is the fact that the central system with the data in a distributed network is not necessarily the case in cloud computing. At times, the data is distributed and shared among the whole network as if it were at a single place. The main use for a home user is Backup, which can be don on-the-go, and also retrieving the data/sharing it with friends even when not being at home. For businesses, it is more of shared space so that clients/employees in remote locations can work simultaneously on the same set of data hosted on the cloud.

Copy.com - An example of Cloud Storage

Anyways, our topic of discussion was this newly emerging cloud storage website Copy.com. Before I say anything, let's get some words straight from the horse's mouth! ;)

Copy is the easiest way to store, protect and share amazing things. It keeps your computers in sync and your files available from anywhere, even on your mobile devices. With Copy, you can also easily share files with anyone publicly or privately. Copy for companies extends the cloud storage and sharing benefits into corporate environments with user and group management and added control of proprietary company data.

I joined this website a few weeks ago and have been using it to store some files since then. The files I stored on Copy are those which I use regularly, either edit them or not, and some which are used rarely. This way it was easy to easy to analyze the software performance in varying situations. The things I would like to highlight before we proceed are:

I joined this website quite early
Since I have joined, the Copy Agent(Desktop Client) has been updated a couple of times
I have tested with files of varying formats(zip, rar, images, videos, documents, executables)
I have tested with files of varying sizes, ranging from a few KBs to a few hundered MBs

The following is the review of Copy.com, based on my experience. Of course this is not a sponsored post since I didn't tag it as one. This is my personal, and 100% genuine experience. I am dividing the review into four parts, Overview, Good Points, Bad Points, and Conclusion.

Overview

I joined Copy from a referrer. This meant that I got 5 GB Bonus Space. For the start I got 15 GB from Copy itself, that meant 15 + 5 = 20GB cloud storage. That sounded cool, I thought to check it out and the experience turned out to be a mixed one, though majority of it being a good one.

Good Points

15GB for every new comer
5 GB Bonus(limited time period offer) for both referrer and referred. You may join through my referral link: CLICK HERE
No file size limits. This is what copy itself claims and I tested with file sizes of a few hundred MBs and found their claim to be correct. This certainly is better than 25MB that iCloud offers to free customers, or 250MB(per file) that most of the other cloud storages offer.
Direct Links of the files can be shared with people. The servers are secure and privacy is 100% You may opt to share some files publicly if you wish to, else you may distribute the link to your file to whomsoever you wish to share it with.
FREE! With 20 GB for everyone who joins through referral, at least for now, I guess the free plan is good enough. More than that can be bought at a nominal fee, though still for most of the users, especially the home users, 20GB is more than sufficient.

Bad Points

Copy Agent is slow, it adds up to the booting time of the PC if you add it to system startup
Copy Agent is resource unfriendly. Currently I'm using v1.30.0347 and it eats up the system resources especially the CPU. Most of the time my idle CPU is at 50% usage(if I use my i3 2nd generation), and at around 30%(when I use my i5 1st generation).
Most of the times the agent is unable to scan files which are modified or newly added
Timeouts are a major problem most of the time, though they save Internet usage in times of useless of uploading, but still at times when things are normal, Timeouts are real pain in the, ahem!

Conclusion

Copy is a nice solution for personal Cloud storage for the time being. It is new in the market right now, so I guess it would be better to give it more time before we expect a Dropbox class service. The no-filesize-limit policy is truly amazing! The only bad point is the copy agent, that has although improved significantly since the first version that I used, but still needs much improvement, especially in the resource management part. For Business users, I would say take a back for now and let things settle down so that Copy becomes more reliable and at least wait till they release a nice update to the Copy Agent making it more resource friendly. Apart from that, the Copy Agent is quite user-friendly and everything is quite self explanatory. Also, the users can directly upload files without the need of Copy Agent, though it makes the seemless syncing is easy. The download/upload bandwidth can be limited using the options in the Agent, so nothing to worry about really! :)

If you wish to join Copy, CLICK HERE to join. It is my referral link, will give a 5GB bonus to you and me both! :)

So that's it for now. Back to blog maintenance and visitng back blogmates! :D Hope you all like the post and find it worth it. All comments and suggestions are welcomed. I suggest you all should join Copy, and of course if you use my link we both get a bonus, so what's bad in that? :) See you all soon again, Good Day! ^_^