Just a little while ago, Cloud was the singular of the first Debussy Nocturne.
Then, for a little while, people put Creative before it, and some mysterious thing for businesses materialized, slightly out of focus, out there in the world of expense accounts. Moneyed people had an ether in which they could put their stuff. The rest of us bought USB sticks.
And now here I sit with about 320 thousand 1985 floppy discs worth of 0s and 1s in that there Cloud. And it's not even relevant that I know what an octatonic scale is, or that Debussy pointfully omitted A-sharp in the octatonic scale in his Cloud, in order to blur the leading tone of B minor.
Just fourteen months ago, I noticed that amazon customers (like me!) were newly entitled to store 5 gigabytes of stuff for free! simply for being us. There was essentially no interface for such transfers, but it worked. Somewhere in the amazon portion of the cloud are backups of old Word files and Finale files.
Then people started sharing Dropbox files with me. And I got 2 free cloud gigabytes for joining, and an additional quarter gigabyte for anyone else I talked into joining. I ramped myself up to 4 free gigs. And Beff and I kept a folder within Dropbox for sharing files — so that we wouldn't have to e-mail or deal with file sharing.
And Eddie Jacobs sent me some sound files via Box. I joined Box and got 5 free gigabytes of storage. The 25 megabyte filesize limit was a drawback, though.
Quickly, there were scores and soundfiles of my stuff in lots of secure places, all ready for URLs to be sent to anyone curious about them. And I could control who could see or use them.
Beff and I took pictures and sent them to our Dropbox folder for instant gratification. Cool.
Then I realized that Dropbox was perfect for keeping files up to date amongst not only my desktop and laptop, but my office computer as well. AND ...
AND ... for preparing files to be used for teaching to be accessed from my iPad — in the non-smart classroom I had for my theory class.
Google Drive with its 5 free gigs came late to the party, but I joined that party, too.
And CloudApp.
And SoundCloud.
So I've got files scattered in five different attics. And I saw that it was good.
Obviously, all the free stuff is bait to lure you into upgrading to the profe$$ional level. I chose Dropbox and bought a year's subscription, which got me an extra 50 cloud gigabytes. I also bought into SoundCloud's lowest level.
Then the competition heated up.
With nary a warning, in July, Dropbox doubled everybody's cloud size. I now have 108 gigabytes with which to play. Dutifully, I stuck a whole bunch of big movies in there, where they fit comfortably. Currently I am using 21.5% of what I am entitled to.
Meanwhile, amazon finally added a little front-end for putting stuff in their cloud drive, though it's still the 8-track of cloud storage services.
Box raised the filesize limit for the free version to 100 megabytes. Yes, more breathing room.
And today. Today, box came at me and said they, too, had doubled my cloud allotment. Mercy me.
I use Box to share folders of stuff I'm going to talk about when I do a remote colloquium — mostly to save the weight of carrying many scores and all. Those in attendance can link to the Box folder and read the scores on their computers or tablets. And I use Dropbox for everything else.
Biggest casualties of all this: the bottom is likely to drop out of the USB drive market. I haven't bought one of those in more than a year (and I note a 32gig stick for $30 at Staples today and the cheapest 64gig stick is $100. Hmm.). Also, it's been a while since I've bought CD-Rs.
Onward.
