Make use of the free online storage services

Today I have officially launched my very own “Make Use Of” series of techie articles. These are going to be short articles about the cool stuff that I find handy in our techie world. I hope you get the same satisfaction!

A few days ago my portable drive got “fried”! And it was a bad day because literally all my stuff was on that device which is now as good as “Junk”. The latest backup was of three months back, so I practically lost the new data that I had gathered in 3 months.

I had a company laptop in my previous employment and I had never bothered to buy one of my own, all I did was make a monthly back of my important stuff to that portable drive. But a time came when I had to exit! So here I was with my portable disk hoping to buy a laptop soon! And considering that I was also exiting the country, I said to myself that “I will buy the laptop when I have settled in my new life” but the portable drive was not thinking about the same thing!

I knew about free online storages services before but I had never taken it seriously, I guess I was being lazy! Consider this a wakeup call for you too and you should have started yesterday to backup your important stuff online! This is actually what cloud computing is about! Not only will you be able to backup your files, but you will also be able to edit them and save your work.

So far I have landed on two good ones, and by good I mean all factors considered; Easy to use, Security, Amount of free space and much more:

1. Google Drive
   

   

   
   
   Space offered: 5GB
   Security: username & password (same for your Gmail account) plus HTTPS (a secure protocol).
   Accessibility: Desktop application (downloaded and installed on your PC) and as an online service through a web browser.
   Functions: upload files, edit documents online, download files, synchronize files.
   
   
2. Dropbox
   

   
   Space offered: 2GB for starters but you can gain another 3GB by being royal to dropbox.
   Security: username and password plus HTTPS (a secure protocol).
   Accessibility: Desktop application (downloaded and installed on your PC), Android application (downloaded and installed on your android device) and as an online service through a web browser.
   Functions: upload files, edit documents online, download files, synchronize files.
   (Click here to get dropbox now!)

These two should do for now but will update the list just in case I land on more free online storage services. And in case you want to contribute another good one, please leave a comment.