The next big land rush seems to be happening within the online storage and backup space, with offering from Amazon S3 and Rackspace, the cost of massive online storage has plummeted in the recent years, to the point when its accessible to even home users and enthusiast.
Here are three services I’ve looked at and started using recently…
Dropbox
An amazing application for day to day file backup and synchronisation, the service comes with a very minimal desktop client that creates a dedicated folder to sync your files into.
I have been really impressed by the quality and simplicity of this service, the way it manages to keep track of changes to documents with the minimum of effor is quite amazing. I have a large folder of images which I regularly rename or reorganise and the smoothness at which it follows, moves and renames files on the remote server without the need to completely reupload the files is hugely impressive.
On top of all these great features, you can get started with a 2gb account for free. The only fly in the ointment is that to upgrade your storage things get pretty expensive, to the tune of $9.99 a month for 50gb ($99.99 for a years worth up front) or $19.99 a month for 100gb ($199.99 for a years worth up front).
Gladinet Clout Desktop & Microsoft SkyDrive
Great application for archiving and backing up your photos, and when combined with a service like Microsoft’s SkyDrive with it’s 25gb of free storage, it creates a great solution to backing up your images online.
Unfortunately one of the Skydrive limitations means that your will probably end up focusing only on photos as each file is limited to 50mb. Gladinet does contain a file divider to limbo around this limitation, but for ease of mind I’ve decided to keep this archive for photos only.
Keepvault
This is an interesting service, the two features that attracted me the most were its Windows Home Server integrated software, which makes backup and uploads an automatic feature rather than having to reply on regular archive uploads.
The other was the price, I managed to get 40gb of storage (with no upload or download costs associated with products like Jungle Disk) for only $38 a year, this makes it a perfect service for backing up my work to (which can change quite regularly).