Originally published June 12 2005
Internet companies provide on-line data storage
by Mike Adams (see all articles by this author)
Data storage units, such as Flash drives, are popular for data pack rats who want to keep their important documents or music with them on the go. However, these mini hard drives can be easily broken, lost or stolen, and often require a USB port, which is not always available. Internet companies like Yahoo (Briefcase) and AOL (My Storage) are answering this problem by providing online data storage facilities on their secure servers. Through this, users can access their files from any internet connected computer. The drawbacks are fees and upload times, even with high-speed connections. Some people have found success using their web e-mail as an information backup, but even a big capacity (2 GB) provider such as Google's Gmail only allows 10 megabytes of data to be transferred per email. Storage services like Xdrive, BigVault, Streamload, Apple's iDisk, Yahoo's Briefcase and AOL's My Storage have the advantage of allowing users to share information with friends, or even the general public. Streamload has the biggest free storage capacity, at 10 gigabytes, but the catch is only 100 megabytes of information is available for download a month.
- Internet companies like Yahoo and AOL, as well as some smaller competitors, have taken aim at these problems by allowing users to store nearly any kind of file on their secure servers.
- For one thing, having a high-speed Internet connection is practically a requirement, Mr. Rubin said.
- "One of the key issues with all of these is upload time," he said.
- Using the online data lockers can be confusing at times and unreliable at others - which is perhaps why some digital pack rats are relying on Google's simple e-mail service for storage.
- Since most music files are about 5 megabytes, unless a user is willing to build an online music library on Gmail two songs at a time, the service is not very practical for storing music.
- Apart from allowing users to upload much bigger files, storage services like Xdrive, BigVault, Streamload, Apple's iDisk, Yahoo's Briefcase and AOL's My Storage provide more options, like letting users share blocks of digital files with friends or the general public.
- Xdrive users pay $10 a month for a minimum storage account of 5 gigabytes, BigVault users pay $36 a year for every 100 megabytes stored, while AOL is testing a service with a small number of users that gives them 100 megabytes of online storage for no additional charge beyond the monthly AOL subscriber fee.
- In terms of free storage, none of the services can beat Streamload.
- The company began offering 10 gigabytes of free disk space this year.
- But it comes with a catch: Streamload users cannot freely download everything they have stored.
- When I tried to store two songs on Yahoo's Briefcase service via a cable modem connection, I received an ambiguous error message.
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