The thing about useful stuff is: Microsoft's Skydrive ups free storage to 25gb + alternates

Microsoft's Skydrive ups free storage to 25gb + alternates Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Image representing Microsoft as depicted in Cr...

Image by via CrunchBaseMicrosoft continued their expansion of their online capabilities by increasing the free online storage limit for their Skydrive "storage in the cloud" to 25gb. This is a considerable uplift - even a year ago they were only offering 1gb.

Unfortunately, they haven't increased their individual file size limit which remains at 50mb, which is increasingly relevant eg home made video files. I realise that you can load these up to video sharing sites instead, but usually you only load finished/edited video to these sites.

Obviously this announcement has generated enormous interest in the website, with the consequence that I was only intermittently able to access the site during today, which is a little worrying - these people are supposed to also be running Azure based services for third parties [Microsoft's Cloud Computing offering], so you'd expect them to be able to handle surges on their own services! Hopefully they will address this pronto, otherwise they will not be a reliable storage choice and will undermine confidence in their abilities.

Meantime, if you're underwhelmed by 25gb for free, you can get 50gb free storage with Adrive here. Easy to use interface and I've experienced no reliability problems with them to date.

Whilst on the subject of online storage, you should also check out Gladinet, a free application which can mount your online storage locations as virtual drives on your PC and make them indistinguishable from your local folders, so long as you are connected to the internet. Whilst the new Skydrive service isn't supported [enhancement being made according to their blog], it does support many other services. However, this is not a synchronisation service - for this you need to look at services like Dropbox or Foldershare from Microsoft, albeit this is imminently due to be replaced by Microsoft Live Sync in December 2008.