Plenty of us still do it, using FTP (or, its secure iteration SFTP today) to upload CMS software and shuffle files around on remote machines. And a tiny Portland startup called Panic built a nicer app to transfer files to your server, using the then 20-year-old FTP protocol (and for a bit of '90's computing nostalgia, you can still flip through the original Transmit guide for MacOS Classic).

Steve Jobs had just come back to Apple, launching the candy-colored iMac a year earlier the first web apps were still toddlers. Transmit started life in 1999 as a FTP app for the Mac, a computer that had been written off for dead but was finally showing a bit of life again. And if you use cloud storage for personal and work files, odds are you'll have more than one Google Drive account-and the sync apps typically only work with one account at a time.

Today's SSDs come still come with less storage than the standard hard drives a decade ago, the tradeoff we pay for speed. You install their sync apps and let them copy their files to your hard drive-and sync changes back to the cloud. The best way to use cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box, then, is to bring them local. Windows Explorer is the same, with OneDrive baked in but otherwise still focused on local files saved on your computer. Finder's designed for files on your Mac-with iCloud Drive spliced in for a bit of modernity. Today files rarely touch your computer, living instead in the clouds, appearing on your screen when needed and staying abstracted away in a server farm the rest of the time.Īnd so, you need new tools to manage them. Files of old would live their lives happily on your hard drive and floppies and CDs, rarely venturing further than your company's door. They're just not staying put-that's all that's changed. Transmit 5: Finder for the Cloud | Techinch tech, simplified.įor all the effort to kill them, files are here to stay, resilient as cockroaches in a post-apocalyptic world.

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