Splarchive: Save Your Documents Forever – Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

I am a very vocal supporter of cloud computing. However, there are few limitations to moving your life and documents entirely to the cloud. First, you get locked into one service provider and their proprietary format. Second, if the service goes bust or you violate their terms (knowingly or otherwise), consider yourself banned for life.

This has happened to a lot of people even with big brands like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. So it’s always good to have a redundancy in place. If you are like me and are staunchly against storing anything locally – even for redundancy – apps like Splarchive are out there to help us. Splarchive is a web app that converts and saves all your documents in the PDF format.

Overview

Splarchive converts all your files to PDFs and stores them in your own private cloud where you can search and view the files from any device. It is built on the PDF format ,which is the preferred open standard for preserving digital documents. Once you Splarchive your files, they remain safe, private and searchable.

Pricing

Splarchive has an interesting proposition for you if you choose to upgrade. While the web app in its current form remains free for all users (with a 20 MB limit), their pro version of the app is all about custom solutions.

The developers will work with you to enable Splarchive to automatically extract information from the systems you care about (internal or external) including all of your documents, e-mails, databases and other web-based systems (Twitter, RSS, etc) and create customized PDF’s for Splarchiving to suit your particular needs. This can be a system they run in the cloud for you or you can obtain a license and run it all by yourself.

Ease of Use

After a no-nonsense sign up process, there I was at the dashboard. There isn’t much to talk about the user interface except that the choice of colors is so not easy on the eyes. The app will be empty since there aren’t any documents uploaded to it. Uploading your files to Splarchive is as easy as sending an e-mail. There’s nothing to learn and no instructions to study. So, start mailing all your documents from your registered email address to [email protected]. The web app supports documents of all popular file formats – pdf, doc, docx, ppt, xsl, html, rtf.

Adding Documents

I mailed a document and it took about five minutes to show up in the app. Thankfully, an email arrived as soon as the document was analyzed and added to Splarchive. Interestingly, all the converted pages are displayed as inline images for you to check. If you are on the go, this feature could be very handy. The app does a lot of heavy lifting to analyze the files. For some reason, the header and body of the email that contained the attachment was uploaded as a document too!

Uploaded Documents

I tried mailing in multiple documents in different formats and Splarchive converted and added them to my dashboard with ease. I deliberately mailed two copies of the same document and the app added them both to my account. Some sort of duplication detection will go a long way in making the user’s life easy. Curiously, I couldn’t find a way to delete any document added to the account either.

Accessing the Document

Document Reader

There is a built in PDF reader for you to read all the documents without leaving the app. All the documents uploaded by you are available in the left pane and if you select one, it shows up in the right pane in its full glory. The reader engine is capable of basic features we have come to expect from a PDF reader including support for printing the files.

Searching the Content

Searching the Documents

Splarchive does a great job at searching the documents based on the keywords you provide. The total number of documents that contain the word is displayed but the words aren’t highlighted in the document. The app also allows you to download all the documents in your account as a zipped archive.

Final Thoughts

Splarchive team has made the app dead simple to use. PDF files and Acrobat Reader may not be the nicest tools around, but they are now universal and have been around for a long time, people are comfortable using it. The developers reiterate again and again that Splarchive will be around forever and you can trust them with your data.

That’s really heartwarming, but given the fact they are a startup and not a well known Internet company, it might be hard to convince potential customers. Also, the free 20 MB limit is tiny in comparison to what other free file sharing services offer. And they will have fix the Buy More link as it’s not working at all.