I hope this isn’t off topic, but gDisk (gdisk.sf.net) is a handy little app that turns your GMail account into a portable hard drive. Useful for those of us with gmail accounts who want somewhere off-site to store drafts.
At the moment I’m using it to store my nanowrimo drafts, just in case the house burns down and I lose everything
Unfortunately at the moment it won’t store Scrivener project backups, but the ability to upload directories is promised for the future. I just save my draft at intervals and upload it.
Aye, and it is a good idea to use Mac’s zip archive feature whenever you store files onto non-Macintosh interfaces. Doing that will retain everything from custom icons, labels, to important data in some cases. Of course, it can also shrink your data quite a bit, especially in the case of Scrivener projects.
Of course! Obvious! I’ve just tried it an of course saving as a zip file works fine. Now I really must get back to writing. I’ve set myself a target of reaching 25,000 words tonight. Only 1500 to go!
One thing, before I go, gDisk doesn’t actually appear as a disk. You need to save the file somewhere else and then use the gDisk application to upload it. You also have to use the gDisk application to download the files.
I’ve just tried it out. The zip file uploaded fine, but the download failed for some reason. Can’t stop to investigate now, but will try again later.
I’ve been back to gdisk and it now seems to work fine with zip files, so I upload my daily NaNo project file. Just to be sure, I check each time that it will download again. In my view gDisk is a really useful way of keeping off-site backups.
hmm, is it just me or does it do strange things to your gmail? I now have some strangely named labels, and some strangely named emails in my drafts folder. Those are the files I uploaded, among the strange stuff is the file name I saved to gmail. Why they are in drafts I have no idea.
Ugly. Is this meant for people who don’t actually use gmail for mail or something? Or is it just acting up on me?
That is the way it works. When I played around with it, I made a special account just for it for that very reason. I guess that is just the price paid for turning webmail into a file server.
Well, either I missed the warning about that, or they should have one! I thought it would only have the tag I specified at startup, and the files wouldn’t mess up any other folders that are used for email.
Oh, I think I misunderstood. It made new labels when I tried it. It didn’t hijack any of my existing labels. There was another project, Linux based, that allowed you to mount a Gmail account like a hard drive on your computer. I wonder how that one worked?
On a similar topic: I have three macs and travel a great deal - how do I best keep everything updated (Ulysses projects, Srivener projects, Final Draft projects, VoodooPad stuff)?
I’ve tried iDisk and it seems incredibly slow, and even more so in hotel room connections (iBahn, etc…) Is gmail faster in this respect? Has anyone compared them?
So then I started using a USB Flash Drive and heard from Gus over at VP that these are not very reliable.
Do I simply revert to transferring via cd-rom? Any suggestions?
It depends a great deal on the drive, most are unreliable. The one I have now has never failed me. It is a Lexar something – silver coloured thing. I think a big part of it is finding one that lets you put HFS+ on it, but that is just a guess. All of the drives I’ve ever used, including CompactFlash in cameras had FAT16, except for one. There has never been an issue with that one. The others will most often damage parts of the file during transfer. The file will be listed, but corrupted. This doesn’t happen constantly, but often enough to be worrying.
So perhaps CD-rom is the best way to share files among computers after all - faster, easier and more reliable than idisk or flashdrive, and presumably gmail as well?
Getting a couple CD-RWs would probably do fine. The flash drive I’m using now has never messed up, but even then I only use it as a transfer device. I would never store unique copies of anything on it, or work off of it – as convenient as that would be. Before I had the drive, I used FTP on my personal web site. If you don’t have one of those, gDrive is an attractive option. Two gigabytes for free.
It did make new labels; it did not touch my existing labels. It created the one I specified (sort of) plus two others, which I didn’t specify and which could be called by a non-geek “alphabet soup” (an easy alphanumeric code). Then it put two things in my drafts folder, again all coded up. All this to upload just two files!
I’ll just email the files to myself. It’s easier. :-p
