Get $20 off on TonidoPlug, Pro or Biz - Your Own Private Cloud in a Plug

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  [Deactivated] on 06/09/2012 - 23:43

  Have you written your title wrong or something? Bearing in mind that I'm a complete knucklehead when it comes to most technical 'puter stuff, I have no idea what you're saying here…

  Your own Private Could in a Plug.

  Is "Could" the right word that you meant to use there? Or have you maybe left a word out somewhere? I can't find anything, words, in your description that you may have typo'd "Could" with.. I'm just stumped. :P

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    MementoMori on 06/09/2012 - 23:44

    +1

    Fixed! Thanks!

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      [Deactivated] on 06/09/2012 - 23:50

      Lol ahhhh.. I see now! No worries.. you're welcome. I must have had my head in the clouds not to have been able to pick what you meant.

      • 

        dan199 on 07/09/2012 - 01:26

        +2

        I'm not sure that, "your own private cloud in a plug", actually makes a great deal more sense…

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  lepenseur on 07/09/2012 - 01:22

  +4

  Tonido plug computers have indeed been occasionally discounted in the past.

  Tonido is an interesting-looking idea, but potential buyers should check the functionality of the Tonido software that they are expecting (and not just accept the claims on the web site) before purchasing the device with the dedicated software on it. You can download the Tonido software free to a USB key and run it from there on a PC to test it first; that is simple to do. The platform generally does what it says but we find that the applications don't do much at all; they are trivial.

  For example, we have been seeking a private contacts manager to hold business contacts and make them accessible to a small group of people but not upload them to a public cloud. To quote from Tonido, "Tonido Workspace is a full fledged browser-based desktop Personal Information Manager (PIM) to store your contacts, calendars, tasks and even files."

  If you try Tonido Workspace, you will find that "full fledged … PIM" is a massive exaggeration, an untruth, in fact. Most simple functionality you would expect is missing. For example, data import simply doesn't work properly. Users have long been complaining about this in the forums.

  In the PIM, you cannot even edit the data in a simple field such as a telephone number in a contact record. You have to delete it and re-type it - how primitive is that ? And the user interface is frustrating beyond description, with wrongly-sized icons, the necessity to click on an excessive number of tiny icons too close together to get a simple task done, the ever-present likelihood of clicking on the wrong thing by accident (such as delete field or record), and no undo function. Whoever wrote this never bothered to take a glance at the beautiful simplicity and functionality of Google Contacts and how intuitive and simple it is to enter and edit data. If they had, Tonido might be strong competition to the plublic cloud, but it sadly isn't. Tonido Workspace has had no functional improvement for a long time, probably since an early release. It does not seem to be a priority to make it do what it claims to do.

  Tonido has been around for several years. They are a small team - fair enough. Our impression is that this product was rushed to market some time ago with most software supplied as "stubs" to be filled out with proper functionality later, but "later" is some years coming and has still not arrived. There have been a lot of disappointments including functionalty aimed at and liked by business users having been deprecated, withdrawn from the product. Business users are trying Tonido and abandoning it; the comments are in the forums.

  If anyone can tell me that there is some software functionality that Tonido provides that is useful and isn't trivial and provided by other devices, I'd be interested to know. Otherwise, this product may take so long to mature that it may die before it ever does much.

  Tonido's one potential advantage is its low power consumption. That is attractive. But it has to do something useful in the first place to warrant being plugged in.

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    MementoMori on 08/09/2012 - 12:55

    Thanks for your sharing - very helpful.

    How does it work as simply an online file store? I agree those apps don't look good.

    Also, are you able to host better apps with the right software?

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      lepenseur on 08/09/2012 - 22:41

      From postings I have seen on their forum, some people seem to have had success in using Tonido Plugs for file and media storage. I have not investigated in detail because that application doesn't interest me, and there are other solutions, most of them one step up from NAS on your private network.

      Having private data such as contact lists stored in a private location controlled privately and accessible by a group of users is interesting if it can be done at reasonable cost.

      For example, Google contacts (public cloud) looks simple but works well, is very usable, and some thought has gone into it by Google engineers. But the problem is that all big companies now want to go "social" and, if you store all your contacts on a public server, then one fine day someone at that company may have the bright idea of building and exploiting your "social graph" which means graphing all your contacts and relationships amongst them by using their e-mail address as a database key, and then what are they going to do with that data ? Google did exactly this at the introduction of their ill-fated product "Buzz" where they started doing things based on users' Gmail contacts, and some of what they did had serious consequences that the Google engineers did not foresee. For those who would like to see what happens when your private contacts data gets accidentally used for an unintended purpose, read this
      http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/fuck-you-google/
      (some strong language, with justification).

      Google has learned since, and this is not specifically a criticism of Google; anywhere your data is uploaded to some public server, you have lost control.

      The motivation for, and the promise of, the "private cloud" is nicely expressed in this lecture
      Eben Moglen - Freedom in The Cloud http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA
      and
      part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=kpHWnH…

      He refers to "wall warts", slang for plug computers of which the Tonido Plug is an example. A number of projects have been motivated by his talk, but not much progress seems to have been made so far. Perhaps people generally don't think much about privacy and security until something bad happens (to them personally).

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  ESEMCE on 07/09/2012 - 08:52

  Also be aware that your usb hard drive will die within in a few years. Consumar hard drives aren't designed for constant on and I'm guessing this device doesn't spin down the drive.

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  MementoMori on 08/09/2012 - 17:32

  What are peoples preference then if they don't like these? QNAP's?

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  gurrier on 08/09/2012 - 23:34

  Try boxcryptor in addition to dropbox.
  You don't get the issue you describe with truecrypt.
  Instead, each file is synced separately saving bandwidth and is stored in encrypted format to keep confidentiality.