Your Own Personal Online Drive
Personal computers started popping up in the consumer market in the late 70’s and early 80’s, made popular by such innovative machines as the Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PS/2 and other similar models. As we worked with these wondrous new pieces of technology, we quickly started realizing that the more we worked with some of the applications available and the more we processed data that had to be saved, the more storage space we would need to accommodate that growing data library. We’re sure you remember what it was like to fill up a floppy disk and need to reach for another one or, if you were out, run down to the local Radio Shack and pick up some more. Soon after that, 1.44MB wasn’t enough and you needed your own personal hard drive. Today, you need your own personal cloud space, which often means your own personal online drive.
What exactly does that mean, though? Your own personal online drive. For most cloud storage providers, and as a result consumers as well, this has absolutely no significance whatsoever. When people upload their files to the cloud, they are used to doing so through a web interface or an application with its own custom UI, look and feel. For some reason, major cloud providers seem to want people to gravitate away from a native Windows Explorer or Mac Finder environment and work strictly within applications and shells. At least that’s how it seems, considering that few cloud storage providers directly utilize Explorer and Finder in a way that requires you to directly interact with it. So instead of your own personal online drive, you get something that isn’t really easily categorized.
These moves by the bigger cloud storage providers are contributing to an ever growing problem in the field of Information Technology, namely, the dumbing down of the masses when it comes to navigating through an operating system. We have already navigated away from the way it originally was with command line interfaces, as soon as the graphical user interface became mainstream, so we have already significantly lost a certain amount of the skills we were originally intended to have. Computers were originally something that could only be grasped by someone with basic programming skills and a computer’s user manual was as thick as the local yellow pages.
This was a smart move business-wise, as it allowed for a wider consumer market, but computing is becoming so easy that it is rare to see anyone with any significant skills present. Most people are able to run their applications, use a web browser, send email, use social media, and that is about it. As a result, this growing trend has shown a significant shift from computers being centered around operating systems to being centered around applications. As a further result of this, data storage needs have grown exponentially, as well as mobile computing needs, making cloud storage necessary.
Unfortunately, when you eliminate interaction with your operating system to a certain extent, you start to strip yourself of the true power of working with files directly. You are limited to whatever an application can do as an extension of that operating system, an extension that doesn’t always contain all of the bells and whistles it should. The more bells and whistles an application contains, the more coding and testing it involves. With that increased amount of development that has to be done, there is increased time and money wrapped up in the product. Most companies would rather not spend that extra time and money, producing an application that is plenty stable, but lacking in a lot of things that it should do.
In a cloud storage environment, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do on your own personal online drive that you should be able to do on your own personal local hard drive. But with most providers and their applications, you will find that the options and features are limited. As a result, you are limited. With OpenDrive, you do not experience any of those limitations. You are presented an application that allows full interaction with your operating system, its file explorer, context menus, trash can, recycling bin, the works. You also have the simple application interface that allows you to schedule backups and syncs, start them and forget them until you need to retrieve a file. That is OK too, but you should have the options to do everything with your cloud storage service that you can do right there on your own personal computer, tablet or smart phone/device. With OpenDrive, you get all of that and more.
