Online storage is becoming more and more popular as high speed internet and cheap, high capacity storage infiltrates mainstream America. There are several ways to keep your favorite files online. If you want complete customization and flexibility you can build your own network area storage (NAS) unit. This is more cost and effort than most people want to exert. Instead, many people are opting for online services. An important use of online storage is for offsite backup. I use Mozy to back up some of my documents automatically. If you want to pay $5/month you can backup your entire computer and should the worst case scenario happen, you will still have all of your files. Mozy will give you 2GB free space (if you sign up with my link we will both get an additional 256MB) to try their service. Carbonite is a similar service. Another reason for online storage is to transfer your files from computer to computer. In the good old days we all used to carry around floppy disks. Then we upgraded to CDs and emailing ourselves that presentation we had to give in class next hour. Now USB drives and online storage are common place. Dropbox is a popular service for this. Online services for uploading files have been around for quite a while now, usually offering 500MB - 2GB free storage. Microsoft has recently upgraded its skydrive service to offer 25GB space for FREE. There are a couple of things to keep in mind, however. For one, the drag and drop bulk uploader only works with internet explorer. You can add file from any browser, you just have to be prepared to select individual files. The other thing that limits Skydrive uses is its 50MB/file limit. This prevents you from backing up many video and other large files. If you want to share files, Skydrive will let you upload to a public folder and provide a url to share with your friends. I will probably upload all of our wedding pictures to skydrive to keep on copy (along with other backups) online. If you have an existing hotmail or live.com account you already have a skydrive account. If not, the 25GB may tempt you to signing up for microsoft's service. Don't forget, you can create different accounts at 25GB apiece if you really need a lot of storage.
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