David Kelly

I’ve just been reading an excellent idea on Damian Mulley’s blog about helping the development of the Irish Tech community in a coordinated way. The “Tuesday Push” idea is to focus on a different Irish tech company / product announcement every second Tuesday. This week, the company is Putplace, a company providing online data storage. Putplace have recently launched their service as a public beta, which means that people are free to sign-up and avail of their unlimited storage (during beta).

I’ve been using PutPlace for about a week, and haven’t had any big problems. It was very easy to setup the client software on my computer, and after that, the service runs along in the background without getting in your way….which is exactly what I want from this type of product. The only time interaction with it becomes really necessary is when you want to add / remove the files you’re backing up, something that isn’t necessary too often. Aside from that, unless you lose files on your computer, accessing your backups isn’t something I’d be doing too regularly. But there is the peace of mind of knowing they’re there.

I did think that some of the pages on the web-side of the service could use some improvement. In some cases, I thought there were some usability problems, with some navigation being unintuitive and certain pages lacking general descriptions about what they are for. That said, it is very early in the service’s release, so and I’m sure it’ll be all sorted out before the service goes on general release.

It does seem that online backups are growing in popularity, and with the ease of use of their product, I’m sure PutPlace will do well in this market.