What's it all About: iPhone file storage

Welcome to 'what's it all about', the newest section of FerretTech. In these posts, I will attempt to be a bit more detailed than any of myother usual ranting gibberish posts and help you, my dear readers,with something. This week, I've been working on something personally,and it's annoying me, so I thought I'd save you the trouble that I've gone through to his point. That something is this: iPhone filestorage. By the way, a lot of this will be at least a bit applicablefor other applications in your dreary, probably geeky lives.

Most owners will know that Apple has disabled the Enable Disk Useoption in iTunes, or I'm pretty sure they have. So as a workaround,how else can one carry files around on their iPhone. Also note, thebiggest criteria: it's gotta be free...

I'm stingy. Anyone who knows me, knows it. So I don't want to have tofork out my cash for something that my first-gen Nano can do. If I've got a 32GB iPhone, I should be able to use it's space for FREE.

So, there are a couple of options still in the free domain. There aretwo main options: one is to have files on the iPhone accessible by acomputer. The other to have files on the cloud, accessible by the iPhone.

To the first of these, the local files. I have found two very goodapps that make a good solution. The first is Discover. Discover isavailable for the iPhone but also for Android as aFile. It involves afairly simple interface with viewing capabilities for all the major iPhone compatible file types, and a quality feel. Connection is byWebDAV, a relatively new protocol, much better than FTP or manyothers. Simply ensure that you are connected to the same network asyour iPhone, then enter the given IP address into any browser and youget another quality interface with many options and capabilities,right within your browser. This is one of those really good iPhoneapps that everyone should get.(Special Note to fellow BGS attendees: WebDAV doesn't work on schoolcomputers...)

The other good one is FileAid. This app has a slightly differentinterface with separate screens for computer connections, and for fileviewing which can be annoying. But the major difference is that thisone uses FTP for file connections. It has a separate sharing screenfor compute connections, and detailed instructions for connecting toFTP, which is probably a but superfluous consdering that anyone who islooking at this kind of app probably knows their USB from their PCI,and thei IP from their TWAIN… Anyway, this would be great except thatFTP is such an outdated protocol. I tried backing up my venerable USBflash drive and gave up after it gave me so many error messages andthen stopped that I considered punching a hole through my laptop screen. Of course, you can't simply replace a file already on thedrive because you get Error: File exists, or you'll receive an Error:File name too long, or any of a number of other problematic problemsuntil you inevitably become so annoyed you will do what I did and putsuch a curse upon the designer of FTP that he will never restpeacefully again. If it wasn't for this, FileAid would be a great app.You can view documents, sort them by folder, name, type, colour of theflying elephant who wrote it, whatever. But it's FTP, and FTP is crap,so FileAid is a case of 'missed by that much'.

There is, as I've mentioned before, also the Web-based solution. I'llbe quick with this, because I've only managed to make one work, andits quite good. Zumodrive is a cloud-based storage service, with 1GBfor free. You can access it from the Internet and you can access it from the iPhone, but since it's on the Internet, you need an Internetconnection, only here you can probably use 3G data. Not that I would,but you probably can.I've tried to make MyDisk.se work, and it does from the web, but notby using an app like Disks. Using MyDisk, you get 2GB free, as opposedto Zumodrive's 1GB. Still, if anyone can make MyDisk's WebDAV work with anything, that would be useful...

Okay, so now for the bit where I pull it all together and tell youwhat you should use. Unfortunately for you, I'm not going to do that.You make up your own mind. I, personally have all three, just so I'mready for any occasion, but I'm personally favouring Zumodrive at the moment.

So, the biggest things that we can take from this is two things: one,there aren't any really good solutions to this problem. The other: I am way too stingy...