Broadband penetration (the number of people with broadband Internet connections vs. slower dial-up connections) together with the plummeting cost of hard disk storage, is making the concept of saving your files online vs. your hard disk both practical and cost effective. The upside is that you have access to your files from any Internet connected computer and from a growing number of mobile devices. These online storage services can also serve as an off-site backup for your data.
The downside is that placing your data and files on the net does raise security concerns. What if someone breaches the security of your online storage provider and steals sensitive information? For most, our pictures of the grand kids and our music collection is not so personal as to be of great concern. And who is to say the computer on your desk (which is also connected to the Internet) provides any greater security for your files?
There are several leading contenders in this space: Omnidrive, Box, and Streamload. I tried Streamload and Box, and chose Box. Both have free plans to get started and reasonably priced paid plans for increased bandwidth and storage.
A quick look at Streamload. I had four problems with Streamload. First, the interface was clunky, confusing, and was not intuitive for me. Second, the upload tool that you use to get your files from your computer to the service was flaky. It crashed repeatedly and uploaded files successfully but told me that they were not uploaded. Third, the site was obviously built by techies for techies. The opening page has a indicator of “Pending Site Crawls”. Is that helpful to the average user? For me it was not. Fourth, when I went to cancel my account, I noticed that they had already double billed me for my first month. To their credit, they took care of the issue immediately. In the end, Streamload, just did not work for me.
Omnidrive drive is in “request only beta” (you have to ask to join and they let you know when they will take you). They never responded to my request.
While Box, is not perfect yet, it fits my needs the best. The web-based user interface is clean and very intuitive. The pricing for advanced (beyond free) plans was reasonable and the team building the service is open, communicative and helpful. There is still a lot of work to be done on the upload interface. Like the Streamload upload tool, it still needs quite a bit of work. Box will also soon unveil a tool which will tightly integrate with the file Explorer in Windows allowing for uploading right from Explorer.
There is nothing to lose on this, as they offer a free (limited bandwidth and storage) account. Give it a try, and post a comment to let us know what you think.
Tags: box, online storage** Download the Best Videos on the Web for your iPod - Free! **
I am still having a lot of trouble with uploading files. They really need to fix the upload tool. It is just too flakey.