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How often has this happened to you? You’re trapped in the trunk of a Lincoln Continental and the emergency trunk release has been snapped off. You have a document on your home PC detailing how to escape from such a situation but all you have is your WinMo or Blackberry phone with you. You do a frantic Google search to no avail, and your captors take you to a cornfield and beat you with a baseball bat. Bummer, huh?
Well, now SugarSync can get you out of those occasionally sticky situations we all find ourselves in occasionally on occasion. The service syncs your desktop to a website and allows you to view and download files on portable devices.
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If you’ve used something like iDisk, you’ll understand how this works. Essentially, you download the client software and point it to some of your directories. The sync process is fairly quick, even on a throttled connection. I was able to send the contents of my documents folder to the SugarSync servers with little ado. You can then grab those files anywhere in the world and separate Blackberry and WinMo clients let you pull photos straight into your share folder.
SugarSync
The service costs $50/year for 10GB and $100/yr for 30GB. There is a free 40 day trial available, as well.
Pros
Syncing is fairly seamless and there is little to configure. The service is great if you’re traveling and want to keep a packet of files together on any PC for presentations or just office work.
Cons
No versioning, so the latest version is the latest version. While I’m sure folks could use up 10GB of space in a few minutes, it might be a nice option to offer some version control over time, ensuring that an accidental save doesn’t percolate to all of your sharing computers.
TechCrunch readers — and CG readers — can get 50% off the service if they sign up right now. On the whole, the service is barebones yet surprisingly compelling. Mac and PC support are excellent and, except for some speed issues during uploads, it performed as advertised.