It seems as if the best days of owning my Pogoplug may be behind me. This is what happens when you get onboard a cloud service that you have no control of. As of June something 2012 the website pogoplugged.com is no longer active. If I recall the website was an unofficial pogoplug support website, unofficial meaning it was not owned by Pogoplug. Along with the shutter of the website was tons of helpful information regarding your Pogoplug. When you search google the results still show up for pogoplugged.com but the links are all dead. In fact it redirects to Pogoplug.com support. I suspect the reason is because of missing features Pogoplug used to have. They wanted to wipe the earth of traces of the devices past features.

Here’s my take on the situation, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right, who knows. In the past 6 months Pogoplug has started to steer their ship towards making money. I don’t blame them for this but they should not have baited and switched with existing plug owners. If you sell a product under a pretense of certain features, those features should never be taken away. These are the three things I no longer see when using my Pogoplug.

  • The P Drive is gone. When I first used my Pogo the software would map a drive on my computer so it would be visible in My Computer. It would name it “P” drive. Well it is gone, replaced with a Pogoplug User Files drive which when opened up is empty, it also shows exactly 2Tb used space with 4 Tb total. I don’t have 4Tb on my Pogoplug.  Also a Cloud Drive shows up showing 5Gb of space.
  • The ability to drop entire folders on the Pogoplug. Maybe I’m blind but I can’t figure out how to add entire folders to my Pogoplug without going through a backup procedure.  You used to be able to drag and drop folders onto your pogoplug. More research and I’ve confirmed on a different computer that if you have Pogoplug Uploader version 4.0.4.0 you can still drop folders easily into your Pogoplug, also the drive letters show up in My Computer with this version.  The bad news is that version 4040 has been abandoned by pogoplug.com and spending 5 minutes searching the net for comes up empty. If you have a version of 4040 please email it to me, as it is much better than the Backup software.
  • Feature rich software. I suspect the feature rich software is now called Pogoplug PC which is not free. Only the Pogoplug Backup is free. Wait now it’s called Pogoplug Companion… I just checked. They are making this confusing, and what happens with a person who is not tech savy trying to figure this all out?

To summarize if you have older Pogoplug software installed and you are happy with it, do not upgrade to the newer software Pogoplug is putting out. The missing mapped drive is a real deal killer using the current software. Working in Windows Explorer is much easier than the Pogoplug software. I’m concerned about future generations of the software and that even more features may be eliminated.

**Update** – After removing and reinstalling Pogoplug software and changing the drive letter in Preferences I was able to get the drive letter problem sorted out. I can now see my files in My Computer. I still think the previous software versions were better than the Pogoplug Backup or Companion or whatever they are calling it today.