> ZumoDrive mimics a standard hard drive but saves content in the cloud and then streams it to each device instead of saving local copies, making it the killer app for the netbook and other devices with limited storage.

Nice. This is exactly what I need for my Netbook.

Versionate was a great product too :)

Not to detract from this business, but couldn't this just as easily be a checkbox on Dropbox?

Suppose Dropbox wanted to do this, how does YC react? Although I suppose there is lots of room for competition in this space...

It certainly could be done on Dropbox, their services have been growing more close over time. Zumodrive only recently added linked-folders, which are basically a copy of the Dropbox model.

That said, they are both YC companies, and it's good to have competition in this space.

That's the first time I've really understood the difference between ZumoDrive and Dropbox. Thanks for calling out the sentence.

Why would anyone want to use this rather than dropbox which synchronizes your files and stores a local copy?

I love Dropbox. I have it on every computer and make sure all of my friends use it.

But I store 10GB of music in my dropbox, and I don't want that on every computer.

I would gladly move that to zumodrive.

You have no idea how much I would love to backup my music to a solution like this, but I do not live in a place that provides me with a decent upstream connection. What kind of speeds do you get when you upload? It seems to me that 40KB/s is a bit slow to be doing full drive backups online.

It looks like Dropbox's selective sync is right around the corner, which would fully handle that use case.

Actually selective sync doesn't fully handle this case. With selective sync you could choose not to sync down certain files to the computer, but then they aren't accessible at all. With ZumoDrive, the files are accessible but "deflated", meaning they take up no space but will stream and cache on the computer when accessed.

I don't understand why these cloud storage companies aren't targeting more verticals/niches with their offerings. It seems like there are endless (B2B) places where ZumoDrive's offering would solve real problems that people would pay for.

I know in our industry (pro photography), having cloud storage that mimics a local drive has big potential. To be able to work in Lightroom or Aperture from multiple machines and know images are safe in the cloud would be huge. That's just 1 small example ...

Why the focus on consumer music and photos? Seriously, I don't get it.

I couldn't agree more. B2B can also be a lot more profitable in the long run and there are clear differentiators that can be built with a focus on vertical/niches.

I'm actually working in this space... stay tuned.

I think businesses will be more reluctant to that as they need to first make sure none of the data gets lost when your service dies or the building burns down

JungleDisk should also be mentioned as a competitive offering.

Indeed, JungleDisk appears to offer a very similar service. I back up my entire main computer to JungleDisk (automatic incremental backup every midnight). On my minimal laptop for travel is a "Drive J:" which gives me access straight from Amazon's cloud for all the data on all the drives backed up from my main computer without local storage. One charge for the software, no extra cost for any number of virtually sync'd machines. Works great for a travel machine where you want access to all your data but don't want to carry it around with the risk of losing it; there's even a password to gain access to "Drive J:", so a lost computer contains no private data and also can't be used to access the cloud copy at Amazon.

I've long been thinking that something like Coda (the distributed filesystem from CMU) would be the best option in this space. Coda keeps the data, but lets nodes locally sync some of it for offline use. It's been around ages, too. Has anyone thought about it too?

That's pretty much what ZumoDrive is doing too. It's offline, but you set how much of a local cache for recent/frequently used files you want, which makes it feel local for cached files (because it is :).