After promising and promising yet failing to deliver their Mac client, online storage firm Omnidrive has finally released this elusive product as a free download. As you can see, the Omnidrive client mounts the remote storage as a Volume in your file system so you access it in the Finder, save to it, open from it, etc. Like Apple's iDisk the Omnidrive client works in the background to manage file transfers, hopefully cutting down on network lag.
In many ways it works like WebDAV, but with the considerable advantage that they have a web client that works properly with Safari and other browsers. This makes it very easy to access your files when your away from your main machine (or to give somebody else guest access to a file).
You can get 1GB of free storage just for signing up, or bounce that up to 10GB, 25GB, or 50GB for respectively $40, $99, or $199 per year. This looks like a good alternative to Apple's iDisk, particularly since 1GB of storage on .mac runs $99 (though of course there are the other .mac services as well). By my calculations, if you maxed out the Omnidrive's storage and bandwidth allotments using instead Amazon's S3 service,with something like JungleDisk, the S3 price alone would run about $14, $66, $165, and $330 respectively. So especially if you're likely to use most of the bandwidth allotment, Omnidrive looks like a good deal.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-22-2007 @ 6:42PM
Sharvil Shah said...
How did you mount your webdav folder there?
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3-22-2007 @ 6:53PM
Frank 'viperteq' Young said...
This is cool and all, but it doesn't hold a candle to Joyent's BingoDisk service. Their service tiers range from 10GB of space for $19.00US per YEAR to 100GB of space for $199.00US per YEAR.... and all of the plans come with unlimited bandwidth and work on Mac and Windows based computers (Linux too!).
You should check them out: http://www.joyent.com/connector/bingodisk/signup-for-bingodisk
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3-22-2007 @ 7:09PM
Alt said...
I've been using in.solit.us lately. They seem to offer unlimited disk space, and their WebDAV access works well under Mac, and the sharing possibilities are quite well thought.
The link:
http://in.solit.us
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3-22-2007 @ 7:35PM
Macskeeball said...
@Sharvil Shah (#1), choose "Connect to Server" from the "Go" menu in the Finder.
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3-22-2007 @ 8:19PM
nemokrad said...
Mozy has also released a beta client to their mailing list. No open file support or block level differentials yet. 2GB free. http://mozy.com/downloads/Mozy.dmg
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3-22-2007 @ 10:11PM
Nik Cubrilovic said...
Hi, I am the CEO of Omnidrive, thanks for covering the launch of our Mac client - we are really sorry that it took so long but I hope the wait has been worth it. We will be further developing our Mac client and we spend as much development time on the Mac as we do for other platforms. Our web interface is also cross-platform and works with all modern browsers.
Something you may miss about the Omnidrive Mac client is the ability to click on any file or folder on your desktop and publish or share them. To do this, just right-click or control-click on any file and go down to the Omnidrive menu. A future release will link publishing and sharing to keyboard shortcuts and we will have the options available in the Finder menu.
As for our pricing, you need to compare apples to apples etc. Omnidrive is about accessing your files, sharing, publishing and integrating with other applications (with our web interface you can now edit office documents, edit images, zip/unzip files and a lot more - we will be adding an average of an app a week over the next few months). Over the coming months, you will also see more and more applications that support Omnidrive as a storage point (an application you have covered here before - Bandwagon (iTunes backup), is one such app). Omnidrive is able to offer all of this, along with open source developer toolkits and usually still cost a lot less than services that provide just an API or just backup.
Our pricing is very simple - we tell you straight-up what you get and we don't try to mislead users nor do we impose any speed limitations. The per-month bandwidth allotment with Omnidrive accounts is double your total storage. We also provide 24/7 email, forum, jabber and phone support.
Try Omnidrive out, we are still in beta but we offer a lot. If you have any suggestions for the product, please feel free to email them to feedback at omnidrive.com - a lot of our development is fed on user feedback.
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3-22-2007 @ 10:14PM
gpshewan said...
and wrt WebDAV, our API will have webdav support with the next release (we will also have XML-RPC and SOAP support). Users will be able to mount their OD store with any webdav client
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3-23-2007 @ 12:10AM
Dennis said...
Good luck people, this thing just took me 3 hours to figure out in an all-apple extreme environment with three machines, an apple n and g adapter. Anxious to read your reactions.
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3-23-2007 @ 12:58AM
gpshewan said...
Dennis: Please contact us and we will take you through it, remember this is still a beta release and we aren't posting all the documentation until this weekend, but we are available to help users out, there are a number of ways you can contact us, see:
http://www.omnidrive.com/support
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3-23-2007 @ 1:03AM
Mat Lu said...
Dennis's comment was apparently left on the wrong post. He was actually referring to getting his Apple TV set up.
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3-23-2007 @ 9:40AM
Dennis said...
Yikes, my AppleTV comment ended up in the wrong article.
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3-23-2007 @ 10:47AM
Gabriel Radic said...
You may also want to try SteekR and SteekUp, another Mac-friendly online backup and sharing service.
There's an offer for 1G for free for early adopters.
http://www.steek.com/
NB: I work for the company behind Steek.
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3-23-2007 @ 11:06AM
racco said...
I signed up, downloaded the Mac client, logged in, dropped a few files into the drive.
When I come to my Mac today and logged in to my Omnidrive I find that it is empty.
I think it needs a bit more work
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3-23-2007 @ 11:34AM
gpshewan said...
racco: are the files there when you log into the web interface?
http://web.omnidrive.com/
if you can, please email support (support@omnidrive.com) with your username so we can look into it. thanks.
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3-23-2007 @ 5:27PM
Jonathan said...
As a sidenote:
There is a decently nice web interface for the idisk, I don't think it's promoted at all, but it is: http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername/?view=web
Try it out...
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