If you are looking for a free online storage service to store and backup your files online, be extremely careful when choosing one because you never know how long will the service survive. We suggest you choose only Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive as your free storage service.
While looking out for a perfect online storage service, you need to evaluate the service on 3 important parameters:
- Assurance that the service will continue to offer free storage for long
- Amount of free storage space offered
- Features such as encryption, syncing, search & restore, etc
While storage & features also matter, the assurance that the free storage service will survive is the most critical factor to check while choosing an online storage service, especially if you look at the history of such services. OmniDrive failed to renew its domain name and the service stopped working overnight. MediaMax also shut down recently resulting in users losing access to their existing files. And the biggest of them all, AOL has announced that it will be shutting down its XDrive service in January 2009.
In this scenario, Microsoft’s Live SkyDrive, a free online file storage service, that provides you 25 GB (recently updated from 5 GB) space for your documents, photos, and all other files, appears to be your best bet. SkyDrive is an integral part of Microsoft’s Windows Live platform so you won’t have to worry about its future existence. Microsoft is also expected to soon offer an Online Office suite like Google Docs, which is expected to be accessible from SkyDrive and vice-versa.
The Competition
Amongst the biggies, Yahoo’s Briefcase only offers a miserly 25 MB storage while Google has not yet launched its long rumoured GDrive service.
Amongst others, notable alternatives include Mozy (only 2 GB), Box.net (only 1 GB), ADrive (50 GB), IDrive (only 2GB) and Dropbox.
But with a significant 25 GB free storage space and a reasonable assurance of survival, Windows Live SkyDrive should be the only free online storage service you should trust your data with.
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Posted by Nikhil Pai on December 21, 2008
Hey, this is Sean over at Box.net. I just wanted to mention that while we offer free accounts with 1 GB of online storage, the Box experience is more about what you get to do with your files and content once they’re on Box. Most obviously, users can access files anywhere. But more importantly, users can share files and folders on Box easily with others and use any one of 20 different third-party applications that integrate seamlessly with Box.net. For example, you can open and edit documents and photos with apps like Zoho or Picnik and save them back directly into Box without any manual uploads or downloads. Or you can eFax or digitally sign documents with other integrated services. And all these capabilities come with even our free accounts. We offer additional storage and unlimited bandwidth on our paid plans, so when you put together the access, sharing and integrated services, Box provides a lot of functionality and a good value for users.