More and more we are seeing everyday computer tasks moving online.  Email has been online for ever.  More recently, streaming music and video has become common online.  Now-a-days even productivity applications are available in the browser (Google Docs and Zoho, for example).  There has long been talk of a ‘cloud’ OS.  A system that would remove ‘your’ computer from the hardware you use to access it.  With such a system, it wouldn’t matter whether you were at home, at a friend’s, a coffee shop, on your laptop, or your smart phone – your programs and files would always be there.  Well, we are seeing our programs move online, so what about file hosting and data storage?

Online file storage has been around for awhile, but it’s not really the same as an online file system.  You can upload songs or pictures, but most sites that offer this treat your files as media and give you ‘albums’ or ‘playlists’ for music or photo sharing but you can’t save other file types and there is not always a good way to organize and manage them. These sites are also more focused on sharing, so security tends to be an all or nothing proposition.  What we need is a true ‘online file system’, one that gives you a folder tree and multi-user access with controls and permissions just like a traditional OS does.

At TrueShare, our online file system lets you build a folder tree just like you would on your Windows©, Mac©, or Linux© machine.  Business accounts can manage multi-user permissions similarly to how you manage network drive access.  The next step is to build direct connections between your online programs (or  other websites that generate or require files from you) and your online storage.  Eventually, the hardware that you use will be reduced in role to just running the browser.  You could receive a large spreadsheet from a business associate, save it directly to your online file system, open it in the online spreadsheet editing software of your choice, edit it, save it back into your online file system, and then make it available to coworkers.  This could all be accomplished from a coffee shop computer or even your smart phone, since the file never has to be transferred to the local file system of the hardware you are using. We’re not quite there yet, but “total cloud computing” is approaching fast and an online file system is the missing link.