We first wrote about Australia/Silicon Valley based Omnidrive, an online storage company, in late 2005. Since that time we’ve extensively reviewed various online storage services, including rumored products from Google and Microsoft, as well as Amazon’s storage API solution (update here) for application developers. This space continues to heat up, to say the least.
Fast forward six months. Omnidrive is yet to launch, but they’ve continued to build out their service. Last week they invited in a new round of beta testers for their product, which includes an online and client interface (Windows only, Mac still in development). I’ve tried out the service and am posting a few screen shots.
The online interface (which is all I have tested so far) works very well although there are still a few bugs. One feature that I really like is the ability to set up a special kind of folder, called a “live folder” that is associated with a URL that contains a RSS feed. Any enclosures in that feed (images, sound files, whatever) are automatically uploaded to that omnidrive folder. To test this, I uploaded the URL to my flickr page, and the images contained in the feed (the last 20 pictures uploaded) were now copied automatically to my Omnidrive account. As I add more pictures to flickr these images will automatically sync with Omnidrive. This will work just as well with podcast and videocast sites, etc.
Omnidrive plans on sending hundreds of invites out per day until they open it up to the public, which they say will be sometime in September (expect delays).
They have also released a web services API along with toolkits and example projects for developers to build applications that access Omnidrive storage. With the API a developer can either build applications that existing Omnidrive users can use, or they can create their own users and use Omnidrive purely as a backend. The API extends to being more than just saving and retrieving a file with user management, payment management, media handling and the ability for the users of a partner application to use their desktop tools to store, retrieve and access files.
Pricing for the API has not yet been announced publicly but “will be competitive against S3 and other offerings” with a basic API account being free. Competitors Streamload and Mark Cuban-backed Box.net also have API offerings, and we plan a post in the near future comparing all four storage API solutions.
Sign up for the Omnidrive beta on their home page. The release notes for the latest version are on their blog.
Disclosure: Omnidrive CEO Nick Cubrilovic has written guest posts on TechCrunch and is a friend.
Omnidrive Interface Screenshots:
Would it be relevant to include Amazon S3 in the upcoming storage API review?
Yep, they’re one of the four mentioned above, sorry if it wasn’t very clear.
Cool! Digg this story
Why be so stupid???…
Put your Personal things in Folders and *Burn* your own Cd’s/Dvd’s and keep it all for yourself… Make 2-copies of everything for safe keeping and you should be fine, keep one at home and another copy somewhere safe, Like a Bank!!…
Then after awhile delete them from your Computer…
No need to put it online for others to get a chance to get a hold of it…
Keith: Omnidrive is about being able to access your files and content from anywhere, from almost any device (windows, mac, linux, mobile, web) and also being able to share your content and files easily.
The use case you outline would be an alternate to an online backup solution.
Omnidrive is not considered online backup, although by having your files there you are eliminating the need for backup.
As for the chances of others getting a hold of your data, we support server-side encryption and in the next release we will support client-side encryption. It will be AES, if you lose the key then there is nothing we can do to recover it. Transport is over SSL as well.
Keith, you have no idea of the problem.
You simply can’t rely on manual backup solutions for small businesses and individuals. They just don’t get done everyday unless some kind of Rainman is responsible for it. The only solution that works is one that is done automatically and puts the files to a remote location, out of hard drive failure, theft or premises damage.
As for security, you simply encrypt it before uploading it. Strong encryption is already part of many of those services, like http://www.mozy.com.
I had tried omnidrive before and wasnt very impressed with it. However these new features sound interesting and differentiate it from many other online storage sites.
Anshul: send us an email on beta at omnidrive.com and we will send you an invitation.
Also applies to anybody else who is interested in trying Omnidrive out (or if you are already in the queue and would like to get bumped up)
Hello Nik
Well, I don’t mind being bumped up in the queue. Thanks.
YOOWZER! That screenshot look incredible. I can’t wait for that to be released. The web interface at the moment is pretty usuable but that looks like a major upgrade
.
Come on guys… now just the mac client.
I’m an omnidrive user and the latest set of upgrades are much better. Soime work still needs to be done on mass uploading… and to be honest, the ability to sync desktop and online files would be awesome (because at the end of teh day, most online storage is used as backup; whether we like it or not).
Regardless, the product is really improving.
Exclusive??mmm …I got in last week….all I can say is….it’s pretty slow!!!!!!!!!!
This is what I mean about the true differences amongst, what are percevied to be, competitors in a “crowded” market. Everybody is doing the same old lame storage offering, whereas omnidrive are truly innovating. Top stuff Nik, keep it up.
Somebody will emerge as the dominant online storage scheme / toolset, and will make a lot of money either through an acquisition by MS, Google, or Yahoo, or on its own. This looks very good– keep up the good work!
Michael, just thought that you might to know that some of us who read your blog at work with the morning coffee can’t see images hosted on flickr because it’s blocked by the company firewall. Images hosted on techcrunch, however, we can see. Thanks for the great reviews. Keep up the good work.
I understand that OmniDrive allows to run various services directly from the virtual drive (omnidrive).
Has any1 tested it?
what are the performances using a regular .5mb upstream and 2mb upstream?
I received the beta invite but have not yet been able to log on to the server for two days straight… it always says “server busy” when I try to sign on!!!
Hey Buzaza, we had an issue with
This looks like a more personal version of pinetree.com.au funny they are both australian, except pinetree keeps backups mainly for businesses, I’d like to see omnidrive support linux in the future though, otherwise it won’t me much use to me
Got invite this am….still cannot connect. Then, apache/tomcat was crushed, no response. Now, their jsp’s are busted… at least some progress.
beta, me think alpha.
Hey Jason, we had a ton of load and bought some new servers online pretty quickly. It was the largest number of invites we sent out in a day and we managed to recoup and get everything running under 4 times the load we had before in little time. Apologies for the inconveniance
Nik