The online storage drives!!!

Considering your personal computer or smartphone, you will have atleast one file which is more than important to you be it document or an image. Why not then keep the file safely over the web in what is known as cloud storage. It is more secure and there is no fear of losing it. Furthermore if you want to share a file to a huge bunch of people then e-mailing the same to so many people can be quite tedious, why not then generate a web link and let people download the file from the link.

Dropbox provides 2GB of free storage to anyone who sign ups. It is easy to use and very helpful at times (trust me). Visit dropbox, sign-up for an account. You’ll be prompted to download the dropbox software which you must install on your PC. After you install the software a new folder will be created on your computer’s root partition, anything you keep in this folder is saved automatically in dropbox servers whenever you are connected to the internet. Inside this same folder you get to see two sub folders, ‘Photos’ and ‘Public’. Anything you keep in the ‘Public’ folder becomes openly available to anyone in the web. To get the web link you simply need to right click the file, select ‘Dropbox’ then ‘Copy link address’. Same is the case with ‘Photos’ folder where you can keep any photos publicly. Simply read the ‘Get started’ pdf and the attached read me text files in the ‘Dropbox’ folder to learn the simple steps. So no matter where you are, your important files are always with you. Just visit www.dropbox.com, sign in and get all the files that you saved on the ‘Dropbox’ folder. Of course installing the ‘dropbox’ software is not always a necessity. You can simply visit the dropbox site and upload the files. As I told earlier, you can keep your files securely so that only you can access it or make it public

Snapshot during and after installation of dropbox in Windows 7. It is also available for different platforms. 

After you run the downloaded file install the dropbox software

In the notification bar, click the dropbox icon and a menu pops up

The dropbox folder, you can see the Public and Photo sub-folder here

Dropbox is present in the Internet for quite a long time now but not so recently has found many competitors. The Google Drive, drive.google.com. Better than Dropbox in terms of storage as it provides 5GB of free storage. After you sign up in the site with your regular google id (which almost all of you have) you will be prompted to download the ‘Google Drive’ Just one click and no installation required. Similar to the dropbox folder it creates a ‘Google Drive’ folder in the same location. Anything you save on this folder is saved on Google servers when internet connectivity is found. Go anywhere and you have the files with you on the web, just go to drive.google.com

On my personal front, I liked dropbox over Google drive simply because I found dropbox more convenient to use and the files were uploaded on the Internet (or say my dropbox account) immediately after I put a file in the ‘Dropbox’ folder of my computer, it was really fast on a slow internet connection. On the other hand Google Drive took a hell lot of time. Even after putting a very small sized file in the ‘Google Drive’ folder it took more than 3-4 minutes for the file to me shown up in my online G-drive account.

The competition is not only between Dropbox and Google Drive. We have Skydrive from Microsoft. It provides 7GB of free storage to its users and upto 25GB to existing users. I personally have not used skydrive so let me know how you find it incase you happen to use it.

These cloud storage options are getting wider and wider with both Microsoft and Google launching Smartphone applications for it through which a user can very easily store files online from his phone. We already know about Google Docs, the online office editing tool. So files (document ones) kept in Google Drive can be edited as well, ofcourse by Google Docs. Dropbox can provide you more storage (additional 512MB) then the existing 2GB provided you successfully invite your friends through referral. If you’re ready to pay then you can get upto 20GB in dropbox. Similar is the storage extension story for Google.

Dropbox, was simple and easy and it still is. Perfect synchronizing, nothing else.

TIPS
How about having Google Drive as a 'Send to' option in the right click menu? Yes, now you can right click any file and then Send to-->>>--Google Drive, its simple.
I got this tip in my regular tech magazine read. In WIndows 7, click the start menu and in the search bar type, ''%APPDATA%/Microsoft/Windows/SendTo'', now drag in the google drive folder to this SendTo folder and you're done.