The London Show on saturday was the first chance for many of us to get a look at some new software and hardware for the first time. One of the packages which especially interested me was CloudFS, the new cloud solution for RISCOS. So I bought a copy and here are my first impressions.
 
Cloud software allows you to have a remote storage area which you can access from your machines (not RISCOS until now) and there are lots of companies offering solutions (mainly Windows and Mac) including Google, DropBox, Box, etc. 
 
The CloudFS software cost 28 pounds and for that you get a Cloud account setup if you need it and a 12 page printed user manual and some software emailed to you. You get 10 gigs of data storage for free and can buy additional space. You just need to run the software and you will find that next time you run !Omniclient, there is a new protocol option (Cloud). Login (there are lots of helpful screenshots in the manual) and you will get access to a shared drive. !OmniClient also has a rather cute little cloud icon which will appear when you connect. 
 
The user manual also includes some links to download software for other platforms. So you now have a shared drive accessible across the internet. So what is it like?
 
I have tried to setup shared drives before with Samba or ftp and this is the first really workable solution I have found. You will need to be connected to the Internet to use it (so it is not like Google drive which caches data on your local machine). You can directly open and run applications and files from the drive, although I would not recommend this - access is slower and the no operating system will protect you from accessing the same file from different machines - at best you could lose data and at worse you will corrupt the file. You also cannot restore files, so make sure it is not your only copy!
 
My personal use case is that I wanted a slick and easy way to share data between all my machines and store remote back-ups of my data. CloudFS provides a really elegant solution for this. It will be interesting to see what Elesar do next... 
 
Details on the Elesar website.