Evaluation of four cloud Synchronization services, SkyDrive in the last

with cloud computing services increasingly popular with internet users, gradually people's life and work has been based on the service to complete their task, the tariff calculation has become an essential degree. in this context, the quality of the major cloud storage services and the speed of the connection becomes particularly important. In the light of the above, ReadWrite, a leading American blogger, and David Soberta, the former sales director of Apple, has tested some of the most popular cloud storage services available on the market. and made a corresponding report.

It is worth mentioning that Soberta, who graduated from Harvard University in 1982, had previously published a book titled Apple (The Pomme company, French translation), in which he introduced his 20 years of work experience in Apple during 1984-2004, He also commented on the capabilities and ways of doing things for Apple's current CEO, Tim Cook.

The following are the main contents of the article:

For today's cloud services, fetching files from one or more computers is a challenging task. This seems more obvious to me because I have multiple devices running, such as Windows, Macs, and Linux, and often need to fetch different files from it.

In fact, for many free or near-free cloud storage services available on the market, I am quite lacking in purpose in choosing. However, while I was preparing for my new book "A Week at the Beach the 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide", I found that some large brands of cloud storage services in the file transfer, There are serious delays in synchronization.

For example, when I want to transfer a file from one computer to another through a cloud storage service, I have to wait for this file to appear on my computer's "cloud disk" more than once. I'm so disappointed I finally gave up this fashionable "cloud computing solution" and started moving files using a more traditional USB flash drive.

After the publication of my new book, I decided to test the four most popular cloud storage services today to see how long they had to sync and upload files, and the four cloud storage services involved in testing were Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud and Microsoft's SkyDrive, the test tool is a JPEG format image that is 500K in size from the image editing software Lightroom.

After a few tests, I found that most of the latency of the different cloud storage service networks was due to operating system differences: Sometimes this picture will appear first on my Mac computer, but sometimes my Windows 7 notebook is lead. So, to minimize the possible impact of the operating system on this test, I started testing with files of different sizes and timed them separately for different operating systems, and each set of tests ran 25 times.

Test results

Then, the test results I got were very different, the best performance of the cloud storage service file synchronization time is sometimes not more than 3 seconds, other services will take a few minutes to complete the synchronization. During this testing process, the above cloud storage service synchronization time generally in 10 seconds to a minute or so. Of course, some cloud storage services have not even been able to complete the synchronization of some files in the end.

So which of these tests do I have, which service has the shortest synchronization time and the least problem?

During the test, Dropbox maintained the fastest synchronization speed in 56% of the tests. More importantly, the service only performed poorly in 4% of the tests. Microsoft's SkyDrive performance was mixed, with the service maintaining the fastest pace of synchronization in the 12% test, but also ranked bottom in 80%. Also, two of the files that were synchronized with the service did not end up in the Mac, and another file did not appear in my Windows 7 notebook.

In this test, Amazon cloud performance slightly better than Google Drive, their fastest synchronization rate is 28% and 4%, the slowest synchronization rate is 4% and 12% respectively. However, one document failed to sync successfully to my Mac computer through Google Drive, and another file took a long time to complete synchronization.

Through the test, I found that Microsoft's SkyDrive seems to be just an unfinished product, still has a huge rise in space, I even think should not be in this test to be included in the alignment of the ranks. In addition, I found that when synchronizing a Word document, a sync service other than Dropbox seems to have some strange additional files appearing in the folder, often with "~$" as the name. Sometimes they disappear automatically, but sometimes they reappear.

Cloud Service Usage Recommendations

1. Do not use your own cloud folders as a "Recycle Bin", and users should manage them in a way that creates folders.

2. If you want to sync a file to the cloud and make sure that you can read the file from another computer, you need to close the file or exit the application after the file has been uploaded.

3. Make sure that your important files stored in the cloud have a local backup, because the cloud folder is updated or mistakenly deleted. Therefore, it is important to store a backup of important files locally.

4. If you encounter a situation where you cannot read the updated file in the Cloud folder in your device, try restarting the application or the computer.

In general, my test results tell me that Dropbox and Amazon Cloud are the most reliable cloud storage solutions at the moment, they only have partial delays in a few cases, and Google drive is slightly less than the two services. However, Microsoft's SkyDrive seems to have a bigger problem, I can hardly imagine why Microsoft has not improved this as soon as possible, after all, the company's future subscription model to a large extent depends on this service.

But anyway, I'm not ready to lose my USB storage device at the moment.

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