9 Free Online Storage/Backup Solutions–for Varying Needs
April 2nd, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 25 Comments
The price of storage has been dropping dramatically for some time now, and along with that trend, web workers now have an ever-expanding set of options for backing up and sharing files online. In addition, the various services you can use offer many different kinds of options–so how much capacity you get with free online offerings isn’t necessarily the only issue any more. In this post, I’ll round up some of the best free services to consider, and what their specialties are.
I mentioned Adrive here once before, and after continuing to use it, I’m impressed with it. It’s a no-frills online storage and backup solution, and the real attraction to it is how much capacity you get: a whopping 50 gigabytes. That’s much more than the 5GB you get free with Xdrive, or the 1GB you get free with Box.net.
Speaking of Box.net, its main attraction is the large set of free applications that you can now use in conjunction with it through its OpenBox service. You can do online editing with Zoho, document signing with EchoSign, CAD previewing with Autodesk Freewheel, working within the ThinkFree productivity suite, cropping photos with Picnik, and more.
I’m also a fan of some of the on-the-fly services out there, designed to let you shoot files and images online and share them with colleagues as instantly as possible. Recently, I mentioned Clip2Net, which is really good for these speed collaboration applications. I also like Drop.io which creates a web site for you to deposit files on, and you can password protect it. Another player to look into if you’re interested in this type of online storage and sharing is DropBoks.
For folks interested in a Mac client for backups and storage, Mozy remains a popular choice. And if you’re interested in backups in particular, MediaMax [link dead and now removed] is worth looking into. You get 25GB of free online storage, and you also get a free piece of client software called MediaMax XL Beta which allows you to automate backups so you don’t have to do the work. ed: MediaMax is now The LinkUp. With the change in focus comes the elimination of the free service as described here. See comment below for more information.
Do you you know of any good online storage and backup solutions?
25 Comments Post your own comment
Andrew Flusche, Virginia Lawyer says: April 2nd, 2008 6:18pm
Nice roundup here.
I’m a fan of Mozy and Drop.io. Mozy does great daily backups of my critical files. And Drop.io is an awesome collaboration tool. Each Drop even has its own conference call line!
Aaron Bailey says: April 2nd, 2008 7:40pm
SugarSync all the way, especially for the Mac. It’s the easiest sync program I’ve ever used and allows me to sync my multiple computers with their online storage. I can browse my files from my mobile, and email them on the go if I need to. I can securely access them from any web browser. They just dropped their prices, too.
Aaron Bailey says: April 2nd, 2008 7:41pm
Ignore my previous comment. I failed to read the word “free” in the post. =)
corstiaan says: April 3rd, 2008 12:53am
amazon s3 & jungle disk! check it out
Zia says: April 3rd, 2008 2:55am
Anybody tried MyBloop.com? Free Unlimited (yes, unlimited!) Storage.
Doug Fort says: April 3rd, 2008 3:17am
SpiderOak is free for the first 2gb. Https://spideroak.com
Jon Chase says: April 3rd, 2008 8:26am
SendAlong is in the same realm as Drop.io and DropBoks, - it lets you send large files to any email address, along with some advanced features like file download tracking and password protection. There are also no ads (even on free accounts).
In the coming months SendAlong will be providing permanent online storage as well.
Khürt says: April 3rd, 2008 5:34pm
I use Jungle Disk ( Mac, Linux and Windows ) to backup to Amazon S3.
Marc Perton says: April 3rd, 2008 6:41pm
I’ve been pretty happy with Mozy. The real problem with it — and with most of these — is its lack of support for NAS drives. Mozy does offer support for external USB drives, which is why I switched from Carbonite. But NAS support is only available with a premium business package that’s just a little too expensive for me. As for “free,” well, you get what you pay for. Mozy’s free version is fine if your needs are modest, but $4.95 a month is a pretty reasonable price for secure, reliable offsite backup.
Al Fine says: April 4th, 2008 1:28am
I’ve been using Zoogmo. This is a free backup solution that lets you build your own backup network of space on your own or your friends computers. After the initial setup it runs in the background automatically backing up those files and folders you have selected to watch. It is secure and fast and I think its cool that it uses the existing resources of unused space on computers.
http://www.zoogmo.com
Pete says: April 4th, 2008 6:06am
And then of course there are the hybrid solutions which focus on melding ‘online backup’ with an ‘online desktop’ so you can actually create, edit and manage files remotely as well as just backup local ones.
This is a really intriguing and perhaps something different to look at in detail but from my pov this is where the power on online backup starts to become practical as a solution to managing data on-the-fly.
For example, I’ve been using the service at desktopondemand.com for about a year now and have been impressed by the way they give me mostly what I need in terms of backing up my local files but then also provide me the ability to view, edit and share that data too - with some added benefits like private web browsing with Firefox and Open Office.
I do think that simply having somewhere online to backup to is not enough these days and certainly once you get used doing much more you don’t want less :)
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why companies like Box have started to integrate 3rd party applications and services - not because they want to be different but because their customers (or old customers in my case) are asking for it?
iLibrarian » 9 Free Online Storage Solutions says: April 4th, 2008 8:16am
[...] Worker Daily comes up with a list of 9 Free Online Storage/Backup Solutions–for Varying Needs. Providing commentary on each, this article is full of helpful suggestions for putting your files [...]
Mrinal says: April 5th, 2008 8:16pm
I vote for Carbonite - not free but SUPER easy (you dont have to do anything once installed) and cheap….. UNLIMITED for $49.95/year
Jeff Singfiel says: April 5th, 2008 9:17pm
Another vote for SugarSync. Easy, cross-platform backup and sync.
Dr. Mike Wendell says: April 18th, 2008 7:13pm
The Mediamax client you mention has a number of issues with winxp.
They’re moving to a pay format by the 25th as well. More information on their blog.
amit says: April 24th, 2008 9:44am
can anyone help me , how i can save movies or big files 500mb, 1 gb or more fast, as it take hours and hours
Poonam Sharma says: June 2nd, 2008 11:06pm
No, MediaMax is NOT worth trying. I have lost all my backup files. Read my account here:
http://alchemistpoonam.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/streamloadmediamaxlinkup-cheats-and-offenders-on-web/
and so have others, please see here:
http://flashvideoblog.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/online-storage-and-sharing-%e2%80%93-beware/#comment-11
Are you guys, going to write about his online fraud to prevent other Web workers?
Judi Sohn says: June 3rd, 2008 4:36am
Poonam, so sorry for your pain. Unfortunately, with the proliferation of these services and companies evolving to find their footing, these things happen. Especially with the free accounts. I hope you get your data back.
We typically don’t go back and edit/update very old posts as companies change/get bought out. If we did, we’d be so busy doing that we would barely have time to report on the new stuff. But as this post was barely a month old, I did go ahead and update it to reflect the change in policy and focus at MediaMax’s new site.
Thanks for alerting us.
Poonam Sharma says: June 4th, 2008 12:13am
@Judi: Thanks for updating the post.
I doubt I will get my data. The Linkup support was undeterred and insolent about it.
More than the data, I am aggrieved about unethical practices. I want to warn other people before they land up my fate. I want to prevent other online companies to go MediaMax way. Streamload changed to MediaMax and then linkup, they do this systematically. I have several reasons to support this.
Raj says: June 7th, 2008 5:13pm
This is news for me. I thought when I lost my backup when Mediamax moved to Linkup, there was some server issues. Even though I had a free account, I was not very comfortable with the idea of losing data just like that.
Web Worker Daily » Archive MobileMe On the Cheap « says: June 10th, 2008 11:00am
[...] and Sharing: ADrive gets you 50GB of storage for free, with sharing features. We’ve covered a bunch of other alternatives, with varying features, all including [...]
javed musa says: July 24th, 2008 8:07am
please i need 50 GB storage
Kevin says: September 15th, 2008 1:45am
Great list, thanks Samuel. I didn’t realize ADrive was offering that much storage for their free accounts. I need to update my list as well.
I recently reviewed 37 different online storage and backup services and included a comparison excel spreadsheet in which you can filter and sort them according to features, benefits, and pricing. You can find it here:
http://tomuse.com/2008/09/01/ultimate-review-list-of-best-free-online-storage-and-backup-application-services
David Sadek says: September 17th, 2008 11:08am
Hi There:
I’m an IT novice. Due to tough economic conditions, we recently had to downsize significantly and thus have no IT help. Please pardon the simplistic question. We work off a server and mostly store all the data there. However, we have 4 workstations that save personal docs on their own local drive (H:). I am looking for a simple backup solution where we can automatically backup data from the server and the 4 workstations. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks
mikkel says: October 8th, 2008 2:22pm
wua.la is a P2P based online storage system, where you get space proportional to how much you help store.