The world is now in the clouds. Sure, we can still store stuff locally, but the convenience of being able to store important data on some remote server somewhere on the planet without needing to set (most) of it up yourself is really quite nice.There are three companies we've worked with in this mini review. We know there are more, but these are the three "easiest" free ones we know of and use ourselves.
Microsoft Skydrive, Google Gmail Storage, and Dropbox. Two big names, one small but fairly well known one (similar to Mozy).
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First on the block is Microsoft Skydrive. With Microsoft Skydrive you get 25GB of free online storage. That's a ton of storage for free! You also get access to Microsoft Office Live, which allows you to edit Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote documents for FREE in your web browser. Yes, it actually works quite well.
The online navigation and upload process definitely has windows users in mind, as the directory structure starts you out in "My Documents", so the familiarity is there. We personally don't think this is necessary, but if you're used to using Windows, then this could help you out.
Uploading files is a little odd in that you can do the normal "browse" for file on your computer to upload, but you can also use a more sophisticated upload method if you have the Silverlight plugin. Right, like we said, it's primarily for Windows users if you want that, but you don't need it because...
You can map a network drive directly on your computer to your Skydrive account without any third party tools if you have Windows Vista or 7. This is easily the best part of Skydrive, as I now have a drive letter (S:) assigned to Skydrive. I just go to Computer and double click on it...it prompts me for my password and viola, all my documents are there so I can drag and drop them from Skydrive to my desktop and back. Now THAT is slick.
Rating: 4/5 Blue Screens (lost a point because no easy installer)
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Second up is Gmail storage. Gmail storage is a combined store of all your Picasa, Gmail and Google Docs. You get 8GB of storage capacity (from what we've read) for free and to upload documents is a little more hazy. Since we're trying to use Gmail as a storage point, we had to download a third party tool here: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm in order to get a "mapped drive" (it really isn't a mapped drive since you don't get a drive letter making more complicated uploads or backups impossible).
Setup was super easy with the third party tool, and we then went to Computer and there was Gmail Drive for our plundering. We double clicked, entered our username and password, and immediately dragged a simple file to the Gmail Drive.
Once uploaded we wondered where it would be stored. What's different from Skydrive is that the file actually creates an email in your Gmail inbox. This has its plusses and minuses, but for verification purposes we went into Gmail and deleted the "email". We then went back into Gmail Drive and the document was gone.
Pretty cool but kind of scary, especially if you accidentally delete your file along with your Spam.
Rating: 3/5 Androids (not for non-Gmail folks)
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Finally we have Dropbox, a company that offers up 2GB of storage for free, but really wants you to pay the $10 a month for 50GB or $20 a month for 100GB. Both are good deals, but you can get a USB external 120GB Hard Drive for $50 or so, so you do the math.
Installing the Dropbox app was simple, and it creates a nice folder called "My Dropbox" where you tell it to be located on your machine. By default it goes into My Documents, which is kind of buried in our opinion, so we changed the default location to Desktop, where we end up downloading and working with our documents anyway (hey, we're using Windows 7 here, we're used to a cluttered desktop!).
Dragging and dropping a file into dropbox is as simple as that, and the web interface is very similar to Microsoft's Skydrive (makes you wonder if Microsoft copied it).
However, the upload process is not instantaneous, and you need to run the Dropbox app in order for it to upload, which is kind of counter intuitive. Once run, the files sync and you can see them on the web. This seems to be taken care of automatically once it is run for the first time, but we believe it should be automatic for the end user.
Another nice thing is that you can make a mapped drive out of Dropbox, so you can access it from Computer, which gives this free product a boost.
Overall, this was the easiest product to setup and use from your PC. They obviously WANT you to use it in this manner, where Microsoft Skydrive and Gmail mapped drives are more like hacks instead of a normal installation.
Rating: 4/5 Dropped Boxes (lost a point because of least GB)
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-Nate
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