9 Free Online Storage/Backup Solutions–for Varying Needs

Originally posted to Web Worker (April 2, 2008):

"The price of storage has been dropping dramatically for some time now, and along with that trend, web workers now have an ever-expanding set of options for backing up and sharing files online. In addition, the various services you can use offer many different kinds of options–so how much capacity you get with free online offerings isn’t necessarily the only issue any more. In this post, I’ll round up some of the best free services to consider, and what their specialties are.

I mentioned Adrive here once before, and after continuing to use it, I’m impressed with it. It’s a no-frills online storage and backup solution, and the real attraction to it is how much capacity you get: a whopping 50 gigabytes. That’s much more than the 5GB you get free with Xdrive, or the 1GB you get free with Box.net.

Speaking of Box.net, its main attraction is the large set of free applications that you can now use in conjunction with it through its OpenBox service. You can do online editing with Zoho, document signing with EchoSign, CAD previewing with Autodesk Freewheel, working within the ThinkFree productivity suite, cropping photos with Picnik, and more.

I’m also a fan of some of the on-the-fly services out there, designed to let you shoot files and images online and share them with colleagues as instantly as possible. Recently, I mentioned Clip2Net, which is really good for these speed collaboration applications. I also like Drop.io which creates a web site for you to deposit files on, and you can password protect it. Another player to look into if you’re interested in this type of online storage and sharing is DropBoks.

For folks interested in a Mac client for backups and storage, Mozy remains a popular choice. And if you’re interested in backups in particular, MediaMax is worth looking into. You get 25GB of free online storage, and you also get a free piece of client software called MediaMax XL Beta which allows you to automate backups so you don’t have to do the work."

We actually used eSnips for the hcplc=Lib 2.0 survey.