"You can take a road that takes you to the stars now ..."

Sitting at the quiet and peaceful Bernie's Cafe in Noe Valley, I had a yen to listen to the sad, sweet music of Nick Drake. Dialing it up on my iPod, I got a few bars into "Pink Moon" before the battery died.

Fortunately for me, I had recently uploaded all 25Gb of my music files to cloud storage, brought to you by Jungledisk. Since Bernie's has free wifi, I just opened my network share, plugged my headphones into my laptop and got my Nick Drake fix.

After giving up on Allmydata.com, I've been busy trying out different online storage and backup solutions. Jungledisk is nice because it does differential backups and it also maps a network drive and lets me drag-and-drop files to it through Windows Explorer. That means that all my files are available to me anywhere I can get an Internet connection.

Jungledisk meets my needs, but there are other better services out there. I just set my Dad up with SafeCopy, which has a nicer interface and also lets you sync external storage. That's a nice feature that Jungledisk lacks.

If online storage and backup interests you, I found this site pretty helpful: Online Storage Service Review. (Note: it looks best in IE.) It recommends SugarSync. Although SugarSync doesn't yet support syncing external storage (darn!) it does everything Jungledisk does and more: it has apps for mobile devices like iPhones and BlackBerrys, and it even streams mp3s! Nick Drake, and all my other music, would be available for streaming on-demand, anywhere, from my phone. Who needs an iPod?

Road by Nick Drake

You can say the sun is shining if you really want to
I can see the moon and it seems so clear
You can take the road that takes you to the stars now
I can take a road that'll see me through
I can take a road that'll see me through.

You can take a road that takes you to the stars now
I can take a road that'll see me through
I can take a road that'll see me through
I can take a road that'll see me through.