Cloud drives: do they make up for the small storage space of tablet PCs?

You could just buy a bigger hard drive and put it in, I have a 300 gig hd in my tablet only pc, and ill have a 1tb in my laptop that doubles as a tablet,

Accessing the cloud requires an internet connection. When you’re out of touch, you’re out of touch with your data files, as well. I don’t know. Perhaps there are some synching algorithms that keep the last three months worth of files on both your tablet as well as the cloud.

The other thing about the cloud is how much does it cost to have the storage you need? I’d love to back things up to the cloud. But I’m not sure what it costs. I recently saw an iomega 3 tb storage machine that used the cloud… sort of. I’m not sure if it backs things up in the cloud or just if it uses the cloud to access your file server from anywhere. Probably the latter. Which means if your storage server bites the dust, you’re screwed if you haven’t backed it up. Perhaps having a mirror somewhere else would deal with that problem

I’d rather use the cloud, and only have to save files once, but then you also have to deal with the issue of bandwidth.

Pluses and minuses.

@XOIIO How do you uses your laptop as a tablet? Does it have a touch screen? What do you have?

@wundayatta Yeah, its a touchscreent hat rotates. It’s a touchsmart tx2

Also, cloud storage is limited to the bandwidth speed you have, and wifi sucks for large file transfers. Buy a 500 gig hard drive for 80 bucks and throw it in.

And now you know why I prefer Android with it’s removable SD card over Apple which is a sealed unit with no expansion possible.

I think what you really want is something like this or this

Personally, I do not trust the cloud. My rule of thumb is that I don’t put anything online that I wouldn’t be willing to share with the entire world because that is exactly what the cloud does. Not to mention the issue of offline access. Trust me, you want something more local and short-ranged, and I think that either of the two things I linked would be far better solutions.

@jerv as usual has some great points. The cloud is not to be trusted, and as otherwise noted if you’re offline you’re out of luck. And thanks for those links, Jerv ! I had not seen the external drives like that.

Your satisfaction with a tablet will depend a lot on what you want to do with it. If you are trying to replace your desktop/laptop you could be frustrated by the inherent limitations of
the form factor. By the time you’[ve added a bunch of local storage and a keyboard/mouse so you can get “work” done at a practical pace you might as well get a nice laptop.
If you’re social networking or trolling the web or playing music or some of the simple games that are available then the tablet can be great.

The androids tend to come with a good bit of Google’s cloud apps well integrated and that can make it very easy to use all those resources while you have a connection.

The app stores for tablets are very convenient and make it much easier and fun to explore new software than it is on a regular PC/mac.
I think it’s interesting to see Apple moving toward an app store model for their regular computers, although I do NOT like that they control that market way too much and take a piece of the action on every purchase.

I’ve had an ASUS transformer for two weeks now and I love it. It has more connectivity/ports/memoryExpansion available than the iPad, and has the option to add a dock/keyboard that doubles the battery capacity and provides regular-size USB ports.
I took it on a trip for a week and had no problem whatsoever. The battery life is very good already and it has good Wifi capability to ferret out open WAPs.
But I don’t intend to replace my home machines with the tablet, it’s another member of the computing gadget stable.

I don’t completely intend to replace my home machine. I think I’ll wait, however, for more tablets that work more like PCs, as in I can install whatever I like.
jerv, wireless storage like that is awesome. I could easily just keep it in my bag or something and pull the tablet out, right?

Yes, you can. Just remember to turn it on first :D