I have a Dropbox account with about 50GB of storage space. There’s also a Box account with the same size. Then there’s Google Drive with 15GB, Flickr with 1TB, and so on and so forth. With so many different cloud storage services, there’s bound to be some confusion.
- Which account did I save this file on?
- Man, this document is on both Dropbox and Google Drive, but I can’t remember which one I updated last.
- I need to edit this file but it’s on my Box. I sure wish it was on my SkyDrive right now!
- Hmm, half this photo album is on Picasa and the other half on Flickr. How do I get the two together?
There had to be an easy way to take the stuff from one account and dump it into another. And I wanted a way where I could set up an IFTTT-like rule, where new files or changes from one folder are automatically synced to another. Mover.io promised those things, so I took it for a spin.
Space Jam
Sign up for an account and you are granted a $10 credit. Mover.io works with the calculation of $1 = 1GB, so for the initial trial period, you are given 10GB worth of transfers. You can buy more transfer space if you want at the same rate, with a minimum $10 purchase.
There’s a $25 per month Pro plan for 25GB of transfers, $99 per month Premium plan for 250GB of transfers and enterprise plans with unlimited bandwidth. The Pro and Premium accounts also come with other perks like scheduling and simultaneous transfers, which we will come to later.
You can quickly check your monthly usage through your account dashboard, which shows you your account credit, monthly available and monthly used.
It’s Only Logical
There’s a logic to Mover.io that makes it instantly appealing. Head to the ‘New Transfer’ and the page is divided into three columns: I call them Subject, Action and Object.
The first column, Subject, has a big button that says ‘Add New Source’. Click it and you’ll see a list of different cloud storage providers, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa, WordPress, Sugarsync, Amazon S3, FTP (custom) and many more. Hit the service you want, authorize it in the pop-up window and you’ll see a list of all of its contents. Choose the folder you want to transfer and head to the Action column.
The middle column has two tab: Right Now and Schedule. As you might guess, the first lets you instantly start your file transfer, while the second lets you schedule when you want those transfers to happen. You can schedule files to be transferred hourly (X minutes from), daily (every day at XX:XX), weekly (choose days and time) and monthly (The Nth day of each month at XX:XX). There’s also an option to make a zip archive of the files so that you get a timestamped chronological file name with the contents of the whole folder. The scheduling feature also has an option called “Incremental”, which will only transfer files that are new or have changed since the last transfer. However, this is a Pro or Premium feature only.
Finally, the third column — or Object — lets you choose the destination where you want the file to be transferred to. Like in the first column, click ‘Add New Destination, choose the cloud storage service, authorize it in the pop-up window and you’ll get its contents. Choose a folder to save the new files in and you’re good to go. You can also create a new folder if you want.
Like I said, it’s simple and linear. The three columns are basically:
Contents | Move/Schedule To Move | Destination
The time taken by the transfer depends on the size of your file. Once you start it, you can just close the window and go back to doing something else. You will get a notification of the finished transfer in your email inbox, and you can even check on it at any time through the ‘Activity’ tab on Movier.io.
Can’t Transfer Files, Can’t Select Multiple Folders
While the working of the app ticks all the right boxes, it has two major misses in its core functionality that are bound to be deal-breakers for many people.
First, you can’t transfer individual files. It’s ridiculous, I know. But there is no mechanism in Mover.io that lets you select one single file from a folder and move it to a different cloud service. You can only move folders from one to another. I can’t tell you how quickly this gets annoying — or how annoying this gets!
Second, you can’t select multiple folders. As if not being able to select files wasn’t bad enough, the one thing you can copy from source to destination is only one at a time. So even if I took the pain to change my folder structure to accommodate all files, I would still need to transfer each folder one after another. There’s an option to circumvent this problem with the Pro version though, which allows for simultaneous/concurrent transfers
I know that these two features are possibly going to be the reason a lot of people choose competitors like Otixo for their cloud storage management needs. While Mover.io is a better service in terms of speed and simplicity, the absence of this key feature is going to lose it a lot of customers.
Summing Up
I’ll be honest: I like Mover.io more than I should. Not being able to transfer individual files, though, is an epic failure in my books. It should be a simple functionality, but it’s not included.
Yet the simplicity of the UI completely won me over. It’s a bit like IFTTT and appeals to the logical side of my mind. If Mover.io just includes this one functionality, it would be the most killer webapp for managing cloud storage services.
Alas, for now, it asks its users to turn a blind eye to its flaws.
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