Cloud computing. Anyone that uses the internet on a daily basis will relate to this. Life without the internet? How was that? What did people do when they needed to access any kind of information and content? Wait for tonight's TV news? Wait for tomorrow's newspaper? What about that interesting show about [insert subject of your interest]? Missed yesterday's episode, now what? I want to know/see/hear that now!! We are really spoiled and blessed for living during such a rich information age.
People's lives on the web have changed a lot since it's humble beginnings, from having an e-mail, to using ICQ and mIRC, to having a really primitive and ugly personal page on some forgotten GeoCity, to using Napster and, finally, to the whole social networking explosion with blogs and profiles and what-have-you that we are still witnessing. I must be honest, I've always been a little bit sceptic as to the real advantage of exposing one's life on the internet, to say your name, where you're from, what you do, show your photos and your videos to complete strangers! I don't get it but I'm OK with it, if you enjoy doing that just go ahead and have fun while you're at it!
While I don't find that way of socializing that much interesting, I fancy the concept of working/living inside the cloud and using solutions like the ones provided by Google Documents. Recently, with the prices of web space going down and with the speed and bandwidth of DSL and cable going up, a new sort of service has been gaining acceptance. Online storage. During the last year some major players (Microsoft and AOL) and a lot of minor ones have been offering free (or payable) storage online. For free you can get something that can range from 5GB to 50 GB; some services are really simple, others are packed with really interesting features. Two of the services that I currently use are the ones I found to be more interesting - ADrive and Humyo. All other providers were of no use to me because of one (or all) of several reasons: weren't free, offered very little space (for my needs at least), limited the size of uploaded files absurdly (my main concern), didn't seem to be trustworthy...
During the last month I threw out a lot of CDs and DVDs with music, videos and movies and also deleted others from my computer. While I was organizing my data, one of my external drives (the one where I've temporarily stored my private documents and photos) died. Every data recovery software I used gave me nothing, I guess it must be a severe hardware failure - never happened to me before. It was bad but not that much as I was able to recover a lot of data from other sources. I don't know about you but I don't really like burning backups to DVDs, it seems to me stupid to keep piles and piles of redundant copies. Also, from my personal experience, CDs and DVDs aren't reliable for the storage of important data. Factory pressed copies seem more reliable but the ones you burn at home may fail to read a few years later. That's why I usually keep backups on hard drives, but if one drive fails you end up losing a huge amount of data at once. So when I came across the online storage solution it sounded as a great idea. Storing data on web servers, on computers and systems that are built from the ground up to store data in the most efficient and secure way IS, obviously, more reliable than the hard drive you bought on the local computer shop.
Long story short - I started using ADrive and Humyo. ADrive is a really basic, somewhat ugly, but efficient service that offers 50 GB. Humyo is amazing, it offers 30 GB (25 GB must be photo, music or video) and the possibility to stream your photos as slideshows and your albums and videos as playlists. Really great. The only thing that really bugs me about Humyo is the fact that you can't download more than one file at once (they claim that their service is so great you will never need to take all your files down, but you can do it if you buy the premium account). Why do I keep both services? I use ADrive as a backup for Humyo because, you never know, one of the companies may shutdown without warning. Going for the major players you know that, no matter what, your data will be safe - usually.
I highly recommend trying out these free services, they are great and - until today - have proven reliable.
