Jack's Internet
Connection
~~ Jack Teems, Neat Net Tricks
When
You Simply Lack the Drive
Hey,
pal, could I interest you in some extra drive?
Hard drive space we’re talking about here, and there’s some
services on the Internet that will provide extra storage.
If you have a dinosaur computer and are continually having to
delete files to make room for a new program, I’m sure I got your
attention.
If you have one of those newer monsters with a 4 zillion
quintillion gigabyte hard drive, a few additional megabytes probably
does not pique your interest in the least. But
it should.
Storing
data off your hard drive and on someone else’s real estate has some
distinct advantages.
If
you’ve ever had a crash and lost valuable data, programs, and files
that you forgot to backup, you know the value of having a contingency
plan. You
could save all this on a removable media such as a thousand or so floppy
disks or somewhat fewer zip disks or CDs (if you have a writable CD
ROM.) Or,
you could just set up a free storage locker on someone else’s site and
send the stuff over there for safekeeping.
If
you travel, you probably don’t want to carry along all the files from your
home or office desktop on your laptop.
No problem.
Store them elsewhere and retrieve as you wish, when you wish, by
accessing the files on the Internet.
Or
perhaps you’d like to share some files with others, maybe a digital
photo of the family or a piece of favorite music?
Send the link for your storage locker to your friends, along with
the password, and they can retrieve it from their computer.
The
procedure is simple.
First, open an account with services such as Xdrive
Express or Free Drive.
If you want to store your digital music collection, then Myplay
will provide storage to do just that.
All storage sites provide security so you can rest easy about
someone having access to your files.
Some
services are free and you may understandably have become skeptical about
“free” on the Internet. But even if you have to pay a modest
subscription charge, that’s not the greatest concern you may have in
storing files remotely.
The Internet has become rather, shall we say, “unsettled” and
many sites vanish overnight.
Take for example, the Internet FileZone, which faded away late
last year.
The service was continued with Driveway, but guess what?
Driveway closed its doors early in March this year.
One service, iDrive, in June this year dropped its individual
storage accounts in favor of a different market, that of providing
software to internet service providers so they could provide remote
storage to their own subscribers.
Others have followed suit, so you might guard against heavy
reliance on these sites.
As with any site on the Web, downtime may also be a problem at
times, so that you cannot depend on accessing your files 100% of the
time.
Perhaps,
though, you’ll agree that the advantages of these services still
outweigh the disadvantages, at least for now.
Jack Teems' Neat Net
Tricks is available in three flavors: You can subscribe to the
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