Six Free Online Storage Services

SLIDESHOW (19)

Slideshow|All Shots

Don't want to spend money and installation hassles on new storage hardware for your precious media? Whether it's for sharing memories in the form of digital photos and videos over the web—or just practical documents you want to protect against that all-too-common hard disk crash, these six services offer secure, and often free, ways to back up your files and get access to them anywhere. The services also provide a way to share your data with others without sending huge email attachments or FTPing or hosting them yourself. Most of them offer drag-and-drop for easy uploading. Though there are scores of online storage services, we focused on ones with free plans and interesting features:

• box.net
• DropBoks
• eSnips
• MediaMax
• OmniDrive
• openomy

There was a time when the computing world thought the future was internet-connected, diskless appliances, which itself harked back to the really old days of terminal computing, except with the advantage of connecting to a worldwide network and all the resources of the web. These never took off, though Tablet PCs are sort of their heirs. The services we review here are one attempt not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, maintaining the notion that internet-bases storage is a good thing, though not as your only storage.

One advantage of online storage is that it's mostly platform-independent: You can access it through any computer with a web browser. And many of these services go beyond mere storage, offering application functionality such as the ability to lightly edit pictures and documents. With all these services, you'll get at least a gigabyte of free space, which you can use for those files you want anywhere-access to, ones you want backed up on a secure offsite server, or just ones that you don't want to take up your precious local disk space with. Read on to find out what you can do with online storage today. Continued...