I tried out a new online cloud service called SugarSync this morning. I signed up for their free 5GB account and downloaded their SugarSync Manager for my Mac OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.8 iMac at work.

Everything went smoothly until I installed the SugarSync Manager. It prompted me to share some basic folders, like my Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders. I didn’t want that. I wanted to create a folder off the root of my Macintosh HD Hard Drive called SugarSync and just sync what I put in that folder. After turning all the other options off, I couldn’t find a way to add a specific folder that I wanted to that part of the installation. I clicked “Add More Folders” thinking that might lead me to something, but then the app seized up, beach-ball-of-death, and about 15 minutes later I “Force Quit” the SugarSync Manager program.

I then tried to restart it, and it would not start. I gave it another 5 minutes and tried again, and that time it took. What I saw was a very friendly, very simple sync manager application and I can appreciate it’s simplicity. I went to “Add a Sync Folder” and couldn’t find a way to add a specific folder, it just wasn’t possible as far as I could see. I clicked on Help and then read about how you can right-click on a folder to add it to SugarSync. I did that, and it worked.

Then I went into the SugarSync website and looked at the “Email-To-Sugarsync” feature. Right along this feature it prompts you to read the Terms Of Service. I went through the TOS, mostly standard stuff except for the section about what kind of files you can store on SugarSync. That they reserve the right to cancel the account if they find the files upsetting in some non-defined way. Not that I would send snuff videos to my SugarSync account, but without knowing what the terms in their TOS actually MEAN, well, I might as well just give up now before I actually do anything with the account.

It was a combination of the TOS, the software failures, and a kind of “suffers from simple” approach that did it in for me. Software that is designed for Ma and Pa Kettle can sometimes lack the sophistication that a user like me expects from a service. It’s perfectly acceptable to me to stuff the “Advanced Stuff” behind a button and I don’t mind going a little further to get access to those settings because I know that the majority of people using this software are very new to computers and too many options can turn them off.

In the end, I can’t recommend SugarSync. The only way I could deal with it would be if I filled the account with a 5GB AES-256 encrypted DMG file and just used that. That would protect me from the TOS and give me the freedom to store what I wanted without having to worry about damaging some faceless persons sense of morality. This design of course doesn’t work when you try the whole email-to-service angle, so it’s all just a big pile of wreckage.