February 25, 2007 - Reading time: 3 minutes

UPDATE: Dropboks is now dead. Kaput. Pushing up digital daisies.

One of the largest complaints I have about on-line storage services is that most of their interfaces are cluttered and confusing. Of these, XDrive is among the worst offenders, but is certainly not alone. On the other hand, one of the slickest interfaces I have seen is the service provided by Box.com. This is currently my favorite service, but while I easily understand the interface, I still had difficulty teaching one of my non-computer-savvy friends how to use it.

For sheer simplicity, the free on-line service offered by DropBoks is hard to beat. Simply create an account, and then you get one gigabyte of free storage complete with a 50 MB file size limit. This bests Box.com’s upload limitation of 10 megabytes. Read more

September 18, 2006 - Reading time: 5 minutes

UPDATE: Box.com has survived the test of time, while XDrive is no longer with us.

To continue my recent interest in using multiple computers more conveniently, I’ve been seeking a new path: on-line file storage. I recently covered a way to store and synchronize Firefox bookmarks, history, and cookies (Google Browser Sync), and a way to write and store word processing documents on-line (Writely).

Today I will share a couple of ways to store regular files on-line.

If you spend much time hopping between multiple computers, such as work/home/other, sometimes it’s just convenient to keep certain files stored on-line. You always know that there will be a copy available if you need it. Even if you do not use multiple computers regularly, on-line storage is handy for archival purposes. If your computer crashes, you can rest assured that you have backups of your critical files. Let’s face it: keeping regular backups of your files is just smart, and there’s no excuse these days for NOT having backups. Hard Drives are rather inexpensive now. One can also “burn” backups to CD/DVD. On-line storage has the advantage of being off-site; in the unfortunate event that my house burns to the ground, I *still* have backups of my critical files. Read more