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about five years ago a friend turned me to streamload for file sharing. I tried it out and didn't like the fact that i had to get people to send the files to me through unaffiliated forums, so I quit. However a year later, I was going to Australia for an unknown amount of time, but i couldn't Bing my HD. I turned to streamload once again but this time for file hosting. Now I use it for file sharing, and back-ups when I need to (currently in Japan, so it helped a lot.) Their new service is a little buggy still but over all Streamload is the way i would go. It is cheap as follows:

- Basic Account - $4.95/month or $44.95/year - Unlimited Storage
Download Up to 2 GB/mo.

- Standard Account $9.95/month or $99.95/year - Unlimited Storage
Download Up to 25 GB/mo.

and it goes all the way up too:

Premium Account $39.95/month or $399.95/year - Unlimited Storage
Download Up to 100 GB/mo.



Or even terrabytes for businesses (a state university in America, I believe, Uses a fair percentage of streamload)
http://streamload.com/
Stremaload also allows you to host files for people that do not have Streamload accounts. The downloads are cheap and the uploads are quick. (By the way. My streamload account has more then 40 terrabytes of things that i can download.)

They offer unlimited storage but you pay to download more than a certain amount a month--but if you have hardware failure that leads you to really need it, you probably won't mind paying, or spacing out your downloads.

Streamload offers a free online storage, retrieval and storage service. It takes only a few seconds to sign up for an account and you don't have to pay to store your stuff (they give you unlimited storage with no additional charges), you only pay a nominal charge for the amount of stuff you download back to yourself above 100 MB. Even the subscription plans are cheap (starting at $5 a month). I've used the service for about a year now and it works very well though using just my browser. I would recommend downloading their upload and download manager if you have a windows machine. It makes backing your stuff up much faster.

Once you select a standard format (there are lots of good suggestions for different reasons here - Quicktime, Real, WMV), size should not matter if you host your video files with a service that specializes in video hosting. There are several out there that are decent, but Streamload is the best I've seen in terms of bang for the buck.

You get unlimited storage and up to 40 GBs of bandwidth per month for $40 (I believe plans start at $5 a month if you don't need that much) and you can control everything through an easy web browser interface. There are other services too... just type 'share videos' on Google to find a whole bunch of them.

Then there was that Munich thing.

What's left on that head is grey, for sure.

One company that provides massive online backup and storage at reasonable prices is Streamload. You might want to check them out.

One thing I find interesting is the idea of an online harddrive offered by MS or Google as a pay service.

It can be done, and pretty cheaply for most users I think, anyone who doesn't use streamload for storage should really look into it. It's got a pretty novel payment method where you mostly pay for downloads unless your data is very unique. Even considering an encrypted HD Image, for 4.95/month you get 3000MB unique storage and 1000MB downloads. The service scales at very reasonable prices to the truly awesome. If monthly prices are too much (which for backup, it probably is) you can get nice yearly subscriptions starting at $45 I believe for the same 3000MB storage, and a total of 12000MB downloaded over the course of the year.

Now that I am done sounding like an advertisement, I just am saying that online HardDrive space has already been done, and done well. And I wouldn't want a totally one company solution anyway, just my fear of monopolies.

As to the bookmark sharing, there are many programs that provide that kind of feature, or how about just using something like TightVNC?

One Login for all sites? Has he ever tried Opera's Wand feature? Or Roboform(I think - kind of like OSS gator, no spyware?) Or even Keywallet?
Regardless that sounds like a major security flaw anyway, especially if it is network based, and not based on the local machine.

My point here is that many of these things he wants already exist. It may be nice to see them unified, but I really have no need of them shoved down my throat in an integrated manner. I much prefer modular anyway.

I thought this initially too, as a colleague of mine works for a company that provides online data storage (Steamload.com). Anyway, they do what you suggest - use MD5 hashing and file size to see if two files are equal. If so, they physically store only one copy.

Streamload.com offers unlimited storage for your pictures and movies. Altough, the bandwidth is limited by the price you pay per month. 5$ gives you a GB of transfer.

I use streamload.com.

Free storage, just pay to download it.

I hope I'm not infringing on any copyrights by posting this... but here's a collection of wilhelm screams. Quicktime, huge, long live Streamload!

http://www.streamload.com/admin_roufa/wilhelm_27mb .mov

Streamload has the lowest bandwidth rates for hosting files (they are not a "web" host) and charge you for only per GB transferred not the peak.

www.streamload.com

I've cached the 8.2MB version (highest-quality) here in my Streamload account:

http://www.streamload.com/steve/gollum_mtvawards_B band.mov

See comment above. It's on a Streamload server and fast (for now):
http://www.streamload.com/steve/mirror/unreal2demo .exe

There is a mirror for the file on Streamload setup at:
http://www.streamload.com/steve/mirror/unreal2demo .exe

"Clearly defined download limits. Recently an Emusic user was banned for downloading 200 albums in 3 days as an "unlimited" subscriber. No hard cap was set in the TOS agreement, and if I were hypothetically using a service like this, I would want to be very clear on just how "unlimited" my downloading abilities were. " Interesting that you say this, because another idea for a company to release a downloadable music service could be tailored after streamload. Instead of going with an unlimited download approach, provide users with a bandwidth limit each month. For audiophiles who prefer to listen to their music at higher quality, provide files in shorten or flac formats. For those who could give a rats ass, provide them in MP3, WM or Real Player format. For those in the middle, provide OGG. Licensing the formats may be a bit of a nightmare, but using OGG shouldn't. Anyway, by using a bandwidth cap instead of unlimited service, they are able charge less to those who could care less about quality and more to those willing to pay for it. Another reason why it would be good, is because they may even be able to encourage the usage of whatever DRM restricted media available. I do not necessarily agree with this practice, but it would be easy to coerce customers into downloading more DRM encoded WM files if they only were charged for half the bandwidth used.

It occured to me nobody mentioned online solutions such as Streamload or MyPlay (great for mp3 storage)..

Too bad iDrive & Freespace.com went offline :(

Slashdot is turning into such a hype machine it's ridiculous.

100,000 users downloading 600 MB is 60 TB. To do that in 3 days you need about an average bandwidth utilization of about 1,862 mbps.

I don't know how much bandwidth is running in between the US and EU, but I'm sure there is a boatload. A single OC-48 can handle this (2,488 mbps max)

These guys deliver much more than that every day. Do some research Slashdot.

I think their online storage is going to have a hard time competing with streamload.com, which is unlimited.