Free online storage services

Hi

No one has mentioned carbonite and i was wondering if anyone has any views on this service?

I know it isn't free but thread went off topic long ago

Couple of points with disks:
All media has a finite life
versioning is difficult
offsite storage is not usually practical - and not practiced
Just because you burned 2 discs doesnt mean you have 2 copies

Points of free online storage
Often not encrypted
limited in types of files
limited in total space
limited individual file size
limited bandwidth (data per month)

Bother media and free services also require you to copy data to those locations

Paid for services
'can' scan and sync all files
deal with versioning.
Should store encrypted files on the servers.
Should offer access from anyway
Should offer unlimited (or near as) storage
No bandwidth issues
no file size issues

One area that is often overlooked for cloud services is that they will often not backup external drives

I use MyPC Backup - got a good trial period and then a cheap monthly rate at under £5/month!

I don't think anyone's mentioned this so far, but uploading all your personal files to an online storage provider may be a risk in more ways than one. Even assuming they treat it with care and don't get hacked or go bust, they could be scanning your content for keywords or other patterns, (similar to how g00gle and others handle your email by default) and they may then sell that data on for the purposes of advertising, or who knows what. And then that gets sold on... and on... etc.

Think about it - they have your email address, personal details and all your files...

This may sound paranoid, but storage needs power and power costs money, so one has to question how these companies are able to offer these services for "free"...

If you're concerned about this, the best way would be to locally encrypt your files first (for example you could make a password-protected ZIP file or use something heaver like "truecrypt") and upload that instead. That way they'll have a much harder time accessing your content.

Did you say some of them have a "maximum file size"... Hmmm... wonder why....

Before signing up to any "cloud" storage, you need to research your ISP's "fair use" limits and Traffic Management policy.

Fair Use is the con whereby they can advertise a service as "unlimited" but there is actually a limit. That limit will be called a fair use limit (normally a certian amount of GB uploaded and downloaded per month). What happens when you hit that limit varies from ISP to ISP. Some charge extra, others nag you to upgrade, others will reduce your speed by using Traffic Management.

Traffic Management is usually applied on a daily basis so that individual "heavy" users don't "hog" the network and make it worse for everyone. What happens here is that if you download or upload) more than x GB in y hours, they will dramatically reduce your speed for the rest of the day. (Some ISPs don't do this, so their networks *are* hogged by heavy users, and hence rarely achieve their advertised speeds).

source: virginmedia.com /images/ STM_20Mb_below_800pxB.jpg

So, assuming you don't get stymied by either of these factors then the other thing to bear in mind is that your initial upload of all your stuff may take quite some time. Say you have "10Mb broadband". that's 10mbits/second, (approx 1Mbyte per second). however that's download speed. Your upload speed is often 10% of this so you'll be uploading at 100KB/sec. So if you have say 3GB of stuff to upload, that will take 8 hours under perfect conditions.

Clearly local storage is always going to be faster, but you need to remember to take it offsite somewhere if you want to protect against domestic disaster.