Competition for Dropbox-style services continues to expand. Earlier this week, we looked at a SafeSync, Dropbox competitor from a security company; I’ve also been testing out Optus Smart Safe, which offers similar backup capabilities across both phones and PCs.The most obvious distinguishing feature for Smart Safe is that it lets you back up phone-specific data such as contacts and photos, as well as computer directories. Given the wealth of data most people have on their phones, this is a wise idea. For each account, you can sync up to five devices (mobiles and PCs). There’s also the other features you’d expect with this kind of service, such as specifying which files you want to back up and sharing them online.
The basic service is available free to existing Optus mobile subscribers, though you only get 500MB of storage. On the $5.99 (10GB of storage) and $14.99 (300GB) service, any data connections don’t count against your available data total. The $14.99 pricing compares pretty well with rivals, presuming you need that much storage. All contracts are month-to-month.
My biggest issue with Smart Safe is that the software still seems unpleasantly rough around the edges. It crashed on my test Android device more than once; the web interface refused to work at all when it came to file selection; and the PC software is a massive processor hog, especially at startup. And as with SafeSync, there’s no integration with other apps. The concept is a good idea, but I think the delivery needs a bit more work.
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