 
Remember when 64 KB used to be
‘big’? You needed a diskette to store 1.44 MB? Iomega had a ‘massive’
100 MB zip drive? Or when Hotmail gave you a whopping 2 MB space on
their site? You are laughing already, I know.
Your laptop could be having as much 320 GB in the hard disk and that
tiny USB drive could store as much as 32 GB. Better still, there are
plenty of 1000 MB (one terrabyte) hard disk drives out there which can
be attached externally, for not much money. Well, you should have all
these, with the audio, video games, images, websites, PDF files and
software that you download.
But these tie you down physically. You have to take them around and a
USB thumb drive can always get lost. A laptop can be bulky. So shouldn’t
there be a place where you can store them all, preferably securely,
without necessarily lugging the files around? The Net is there to help.
Enter online storage.
Yes, the Internet is a huge virtual hard drive. It’s got a little
space for you too. Instead of carrying laptops and hard drives with you,
why don’t you backup or store your files on the Net? You can access them
from anywhere on Earth - provided you have an internet connection, but
there are one or two which can be accessed offline.
The process is rather simple. You simply upload your files to the
web, on a number of specialist sites. You can select what you want to do
with your files - if you just want to store them in cyberspace, fine.
But if you want to send them to a friend, let other people download them
or even publish them on the web, all that can be dome for you with a few
mouse clicks.
 If
secure storage is what you want, there is literally a small price to
pay, but the convenience is unbeatable. Most sites are free, unless you
want to send super-large files frequently. Then you can opt for a
monthly or yearly plan.
Believe it or not, one of the most convenient places to store your
files is in your web-based email account such as Yahoo or Gmail, though
the latter has a separate, excellent documents service. One of the first
dedicated file hosting you should look at is www.drivehq.com. It offers
for free many features that you have to pay for at other sites.
Mediafire (www.mediafire.com) and Fileflyer (www.fileflyer.com) let
you upload large files up to 100 MB even without registering, but it is
better to register to get the full gamut of services. And if you want to
send large files to your friends, check out these two as well as Pando (www.pando.com),
because web based email accounts generally have an attachment limit of
10 or 20 MB.
Mozy, Box.net and elephantdrive.com are good alternatives, as are
savefile.com, filewind.com, filesend.net, snapdrive.net and
www.adrive.com, which has a generous 50 GB storage limit. Do a Google
search and you will come across many more such sites. But do remember
that sites crash - and also vanish - on the Internet, so always have a
physical backup of your important documents at home or office. Well, you
know how cheap those thumb drives are.....
- Pramod
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