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Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

> 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 :)

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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.

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