Thursday, July 21, 2011

Trend Micro SafeSync is OK but has some flaws

I wrote a disclaimer below, but I wanted to let you know that I am a BzzAgent. That means, I get to try new products every once in a while, often for free. After I try them, I write a review or I talk to people about the product or both. In this case, I wanted to write a review about a product that I am trying for free, a program that uploads documents and other items to a virtual cloud that you can access from your computer or other mobile device.  It is supposed to keep them safe, in case something happens to your computer or hard drives. They use the same type of security a bank uses and you can send a link to others so that they can view your files as well. Here is my review:

 Trend Micro SafeSync has some great features if you are looking to keep some documents safe and accessible outside of your home. For me, I am looking for a program that could keep all my photos and documents safe in case something happened to my computer or multiple hard drives. It took a few hours for SafeSync to upload 5.1 GB of content from my computer. After that, however, it almost instantaneously updated my online account when I moved an item into another folder.  When I couldn't remember my password, it took at least 5 minutes before I saw the link in my email. But getting through to customer service was very fast, and I got someone who spoke English well, not a foreigner.  There are several issues however. One is that as a Mac user, I have to use Safari instead of Firefox to optimally use SafeSync since there are a few known issues like the inability to do drag and drop with Firefox. I almost always use Firefox and think Safari is not as secure. Second, I could not see my raw photo files at all in thumbnail view or through the online editor, and some  jpg files that I should have been able to see in my thumbnail view also did not show until I saw it in the online viewer.. Overall, the viewer was slow. Third, in the promo video, it states that I should be able to use their online photo editor, but I could not figure out how to do this. The video also states that I could edit and then send it to facebook, but I saw no link to send a photo to FB. Fourth, I have several hundred GB worth of photos and videos and the price to store 100GB is prohibitive (about $90 without a promo code!) compared to that of Flickr pro which costs much less to store and I get unlimited storage. And if I want to store documents, I can store at least 2 GB through Yahoo mail for free. Of course, these 2 options don't sync for you. Overall, I think if you have a lot of non-photo/video documents, this might be a good way to store them safely. But if you are like me and have tons of photos/video to keep archived, this is not the ideal solution. 
I read some other reviews and other possible issues are the slowing down of your computer. For now, I may use this as a backup while I have the year subscription, but I will be continuing to use my Flickr pro account and my hard drives.
Disclaimer: I am a BzzAgent. I received a free subscription for a year for a 10GB account from BzzAgent.com.
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Introduction

I wanted to publish a blog with just reviews, as opposed to my personal blog. I call myself a scrunchy mama--not quite crunchy, but adhering to some practices that would qualify me (i.e. attachment parenting, organic foods, reusable bags, etc.)