storage posts

Looking for a convenient place to store 5GB of your documents and media files for free? Acrobat.com is a decent option, though getting files uploaded can be a bit of a hassle. Their web interface only allows you to send one file at a time and you can't send whole folders. That can make for a pretty lengthy upload process.

A more convenient way to do it is with CloudDrive, a small Windows application which provides drag-and-drop simplicity. It's similar to Gladinet and SkyDrive Explorer. Launch CloudDrive, drag in some folders and files, and let it handle the formerly tedious upload process for you!

Acrobat.com accepts just about any file type, so you should be able to drop in things like 7-zip archives, .mp3 files, or anything else you want to back up for free (like my Lego Digital Designer files). Just make sure you read the terms of service before you get started to make sure this is the right fit for you.

CloudDrive is a free download and works on Windows XP or newer.

As a Brit, I only know of Comcast as 'that ISP that throttles peer-to-peer traffic', but it's good to see they're back in the saddle and providing value-added services like this!

As of now, Comcast users can login and claim their 2GB of free online backup/file sharing space. As CNET points out, it's run by the successful Mozy, which also manages the online backup/storage for McAfee (and despite our collective hatred for McAfee, it's probably a sign that Mozy knows what it's doing!)

The only other interesting bit is a statistic from Mozy: apparently 140,000 hard drives crash every week, in just the U.S. Every time a hard drive crashes it's like losing a bit of your soul -- and a free 2GB of storage is more than enough space for your sensitive documents and a generous handful of family photos.

Box.net, a very useful online storage provider, just got a heck of a lot more useful. Box is introducing a Flash-based viewer that will allow you to preview media files hosted on the service. It's not just mp3s and photos, although those are included, too. You'll be able to view Photoshop PSD files, code snippets, Flash videos, Microsoft Office files and more.

Box scored this new viewer from Increo, a company they recently acquired. Increo was marketing it as an embed-anywhere solution called Embedit.in. Embedit.in got high marks from Download Squad for its impressive ease of use, so it should make a great addition to the larger Box.net storage option. Now Box can provide a place to store your files AND a way to embed them, which is an attractive proposition indeed.

[via CNET]

If Google's not going to come right out and release a product called gDrive, someone else might as well. That someone else appears to be GlideOS.

The service recently bumped their free offering to a whopping 30GB -- 30 times more than what Google is offering. You can also upgrade to a premium account which gets you 250GB for $50US per year -- the same price gets you 200GB from Google.

There is a downside, of course. Glide doesn't allow just any old file - their storage is earmarked for media and documents, so you won't be uploading things like installers and archives.

To make it easier for us to get our files synced up with the cloud, Glide provides a desktop client for Windows, Mac, Linux (RPM), and Solaris/OpenSolaris (yes, really!). There's also a mobile portal which you can access from just about any smartphone.

Glide's free storage is a nice complement for netbooks with smaller SSD drives - and a solid option for sync-powered backup of your important files.

Computers fail. And so it's always a good idea to have a backup solution, whether it involves regularly copying your important data to a spare hard drive, burning it to disc, or syncing it with an offsite backup network. While companies such as Mozy and Carbonite have made a business out of offering subscription online backup solutions, startup Zoogmo took a different approach by offering users a peer to peer backup solution.

The main difference is that Carbonite and Mozy are still around, while Zoogmo announced today that it will be closing its doors on December 31st. The other difference is that traditional online backup services invest in bandwidth and server space while Zoogmo hoped to rely on a network of users willing to share their bandwidth and space on their hard drives.

Theoretically, that could have worked beautifully. The data would be encrypted, and you could select a trusted group of friends that would help store backups of your data. But while Zoogmo hasn't given any official explanation for the company's decision to pull the plug, I'm guessing it was difficult to sustain a peer to peer network for a company that few people had ever heard of. Storage space and bandwidth would necessarily be limited. More importantly, something about hosting your data backups on a server farm with a big name company feels a lot safer than trusting your important files to a ragtag P2P network.

Gladinet is an excellent way to plug your Windows desktop in to a number of cloud storage providers - like Amazon, SkyDrive, Google Docs - as well as your own FTP and WebDAV servers. They also recently added a nifty cloud-to-cloud backup feature.

In the update to version 1.4, Gladinet has built in the ability to selectively back up specific file types to your remote storage. Want to make sure you have a current set of your local files at the ready on Google Docs? Maybe zip all your photos up to LiveDrive? It's a breeze in the new version.

From your system tray, just right-click the Gladinet icon and choose backup my files online, and in addition to folder and Google Docs backups you can now select Documents/Photos/Videos/Music as options.

Pick one, and Gladinet quickly scours your hard drive for the appropriate files. You can exclude anything you want - for example, stray .GIF images that might be selected by default.

The new task options make backing up your most essential personal files a breeze.

If you're a believer in the cloud, Gladinet is a must-have free download and the pro version is well worth a look at $39.99 (home) or $59.99 (commercial).

You may not have heard about it before, but Google has been offering additional storage for GMail and Picasa Web users for quite some time. Today, the folks in Mountain View announced big time price breaks.

If you want a little extra elbow room for your email, attachments, and shared photos plans now start at a whopping 20 gigabytes for only $5 per year. Not enough, you say? You'll be happy to know that Google offers up to a full terabyte for $256 annually. Granted, right now you can only use this space for GMail and Picasa Web stuff.

I think I'll be passing on that 16 TB option Sebastian screencapped for now, thanks.

At any rate, Chrome OS in on the way and that likely means we'll finally get our hands on the elusive GDrive as well. Here's hoping it does, anyway.

In the event that Google does open things up, how do their plans stack up against other popular offerings? Let's look at DropBox. For 50Gb of storage, you'll spend $10 per month. With Google's new plans, $20 will get you 80Gb - for the entire year. That's not too shabby.

Sure would be nice if we could use it for all-purpose storage. You listening, Google?

Who's with me?

Motorola's Droid is a sweet piece of hardware that's hyped to give the iPhone a run for its money, especially since it's running the new Android 2.0 OS, and works on the Verizon network in the US. We care about software here at Download Squad though, and there's some dismaying news about the Droid on that front: it has only 256MB for app storage. Seriously.

The Droid reportedly only packs a 512MB ROM (that's the built-in memory), of which only half is allocated for apps. There are some iPhone games that couldn't even fit in that teeny-weeny storage space! But at least it's expandable, right? Um, nope. Google doesn't support installing apps to the SD cards that Motorola relies on, so developers are pretty limited in terms of file sizes for their Android 2.0 software.

The Droid may have a solid CPU and GPU for gaming, but games that take full advantage of that hardware are likely to need 100 megabytes or more of storage space. That's going to make things pretty tough until Android 2.0 comes to a device with a lot more pre-installed flash memory.

[via Daring Fireball]

UPDATE: While it's true that the Droid only has 256MB for apps, commenters have pointed out that various resources for the apps (graphics, etc.) CAN be stored on the device's SD cards. It looks like the situation isn't as bad as the numbers seem to indicate at first.

Dropbox, the über-slick cloud storage and backup app, now has an iPhone version. You can use the iPhone app to get to your Dropbox on the go, sync media files from your phone to your Dropbox, and share links. You'll need a free Dropbox account - which comes with 2 gigs of storage space - to use the iPhone app, but you can sign up directly from your iPhone.

The iPhone app works with Dropbox's photo gallery feature, so it's easy to upload and view photos on the go. You can also download any of your stored files that you can view on an iPhone, which strikes me as pretty darn brilliant: now, instead of just using Dropbox to back up your computer, you can use it to back up all the media on your phone, too.

If you're away from a computer and your iPhone's music and photos get wiped, they'll still be safely waiting for you in your Dropbox.

Update: Although you can obviously store music (and anything else) on your Dropbox account, there's not actually a way to sync music to your iPhone via Dropbox. Oops. Photos and videos definitely work, though.

Here's an idea I wish I had thought of first: instead of backing up files from your PC to the "cloud" of some online storage service, create a way to back up data from cloud to another. Gladinet's already doing it (for Google Docs users, anyway). With the latest version of Gladinet, you can back up your Google Docs data to Amazon S3, Windows Live SkyDrive, Box.net and more. The backup process can also be automated, so it'll take place behind the scenes, with no work required on the user's part.

Sure, backing up Google Docs might not be such a big deal, but the principle is solid. Arguably, the toughest thing about selling new users on the cloud is convincing them that their data will be safe when it's not stored on a device they can see. The extra security of being able to back up crucial data to multiple systems, in case one provider has an outage, makes the cloud look a heck of a lot more reassuring to the unconverted. For now, though, it's just a good way to back up your documents.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Need to sync files across machines? Need to access those files on your mobile devices? SugarSync to the rescue. There are currently SugarSync clients for WinMo, BlackBerry, iPhone, Mac and Windows, and starting today, Android phones (Android netbooks too, if they ever appear).

The apps are free, but you pay for storage, starting at $4.99 a month. You can try it free for 30 days, or keep it free with a mere 2GB of storage. You get 30GB for the $4.99 price. SugarSync hasn't yet replaced my current favorite, DropBox, but in light of Apple's iDisk app release, it seems there are more options for syncing files than ever. Here's to choice!

Do you ever think about the family lineage of your hard drive? Heck, do you ever think about the history of your hard drive at all? Of course you don't. Hard disk storage has become so ubiquitous, so reliable, and so inexpensive that most of us never give it a second thought. But where would Download Squad be if you didn't have all that cheap, seemingly endless space to download your prize finds to?

Nowhere, that's where.

So hard disk drive, we salute you. These videos, which I found on the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center are true gems. The first, an IBM marketing film-strip ca. 1957, dramatizes the invention of the hard disk at 99 Notre Dame, San Jose, California by IBM engineers in the early 1950s. The entire concept of storing data in such a way that it's directly addressable, and accessible at random is so heady and incomprehensible for the time, they explain it over and over again. It even demonstrates how they built a marketing tour bus and went on the road to demo the new hotness to customers across the USA.

The second is a true geeky-pleasure masterpiece. A very technical discussion of the inner workings of IBM's second generation of hard drives. Possibly intended for engineers who serviced the units -- which look larger than your washing machine and dryer put together -- it's as dry as a bread sandwich, but it shows some amazing footage of the inner workings doing their thing. Amazingly, those inner workings haven't really changed *that* much in principle, they've just gotten a whole lot smaller, faster, cheaper and densely packed with bits and bytes.

Grab some popcorn and click through to check out both videos.

If you've used a file-sharing service that lets you upload files and send the link to a friend via email, you might appreciate FileTwt. It's the same idea, but you pass the link along via a tweet or a direct message on Twitter.

In keeping with Twitter's spirit of brevity -- or maybe with FileTwt's inevitable bandwidth costs -- the max file upload is currently only 20mb. FileTwt is a brilliant idea for a couple of reasons, though.

Twitter can be a good broadcast and promotion mechanism, and sometimes you want to share a new design or a demo of some music you recorded with everyone who follows you on Twitter. Or maybe you have a friend who needs a file, and Twitter is the only way you two are connected. Tweeting can definitely be faster than sending email.

If you had to back up every hard drive, USB key and portable device in your possession, just how much space would it take? What if you wanted to backup the Intarwebs? I see you reaching for that 1TB back pack drive. Not so fast! Try 4.5 Petabytes. That's four and a half quadrillion bytes.

In order to support the ever growing Wayback Machine at Archive.org, Sun just delivered a brand-spanking new data-center in a shipping container. To put that much data storage in perspective, it would hold nearly 55 copies of everything in the Libraries of Congress.

Dude, when that deal with the guy in Lagos comes through, this is the very first thing I'm buying! Take the jump to watch a 4 minute video which would make any good storage addict drool.

Drop.io is known for having one of the best, most simple file storage interfaces out there. They've already expanded into file sending (usend.io) and tweeting (tweet.io), and music playlists are the next thing on the hit list. Enter playlist.io. It gives you 102mb of space to upload audio files into a playlist that you can play or redownload from anywhere.

Once your music is uploaded, you can customize the look of your playlist, or subscribe to it in RSS. Possibly the coolest feature is Dropcast, which lets you subscribe to your playlist as a podcast in iTunes. Forget turning Playlist.io into the next Megaupload or Rapidshare, though. It's not searchable, and they have a one-click takedown policy.