Online Storage – Sky Drive

Sky Drive is a great name. Even better than its name is it’s simple concept, a hard drive on the Internet, or as I like to say, a hard drive in the sky. It’s such a simple and brilliant concept that it’s hard to believe no one’s done it before.Well, that’s not entirely true, there are other hosts out there. This is not an in-depth review or comparison to other similar services (such as Gmail), rather a word of mouth quick shout out to idea behind it all: online storage.

It’s brilliant. It’s incredibly handy. I have Sky Drive, but I can’t imagine other services being too dissimilar, so for the sake of this I’m going to base it on Windows Live Sky Drive.

Released in 2007, this has fast become one of my favorite ‘ services ‘. The system is tied into the Windows Live ID system, so you can sign in along with Hotmail, MSN, etc. You have up to 5GB of storage for Music, Pictures, Documents and Videos. You can set the folders as private or public, which the latter doesn’t require a Window Live account. Pretty straight foreword.

Now imagine the scenarios. Need a certain file for use in work or college ? Don’t have a USB pen drive? Sky Drive it. Just can’t physically be bothered to carry a pen drive? You don’t need to. Its incredibly useful and there’s really no excuse not to check it out.

The only shortcomings I can think of (which are few ) are it’s an internet browser based service, meaning Internet connection is a must, which can be tricky if a server has gone down in work. 5GB space size surely won’t bother anyone either but if there are some mega space junkies out there who require that, then I Guess that’s a problem. But then if that was the case they would simply have chosen a different online storage account. The general slippery quality of Microsoft services is also another, for example I could not register my account for months due to a fault with Sky Drive.

Bottom Line, Online Storage is great stuff. I’m even using it now for this article.