Last updated on July 23, 2020
I’ve liked the direction of the Pogoplug hardware and Dropbox service for some time, so I was curious what would happen when the former got into the turf of the latter in the converging fields of personal clouds. That’s what happened with Pogolug 3.0, which enables you to turn a PC into the equivalent of a Pogoplug for free. A few years ago, a startup called Avvenu did something quite similar. It was scooped up by Nokia, renamed Ovi Files, and ultimately discontinued. Pogoplug competitor TonidoPlug has offered a software implementation for some time. And then there’s Weezo, which looks pretty impressive, but I’ve had issues with it traversing certain firewalls. And there are lots of other approaches out there as well.
So I will be using the Pogoplug 3.0 software for a number of things, including using certain PCs as ad hoc servers for when I quickly need to share a file. But at least until Cloud Engines implements true true two-way sync – the magic behind the Dropbox and Evernote clients – I’ll be sticking to Dropbox’s 2 GB limit for a number of sharing tasks. Pogoplug may have a harder time implementing sync because it potentially has to do multipoint sync across multiple servers and perhaps move massive amounts of data around (like SugarSync), but it clearly has to be on the roadmap for the company.