17 Online File Storage Services Tested

prostoalex writes "PC World reviewed 17 online file storage services. According to the summary: 'Of the 17 services we tried, our favorite backup service is IBackup, while the GoDaddy Online File Folder is our pick of the storage sites. And for sharing files, we like the free 4shared.com service.'" They're also thoughtful enough to include a warning about the pitfalls of saving your data online.

Comments

Data Dumps

[headkase]

Reminds me of a scene in The Turing Option where the main character has to physically make a trip to an out of country data dump to retrieve some bad mojo. This leads to a question of where the posts data dumps are located? Which jurisdictions do they fall under and therefore what laws?
And relatedly when gigabit connections become common sometime in the future you could keep your mp3's or divx movies in a dump and not notice any latency accessing them when the net isn't down ( ;) ).

GDrive

[ironring2006]

So I started trying to read through all the 17 different ones they reviewed, but when I saw such small numbers as 50MB and actual dollar $igns, all I could think of was the Gmail space extension for Firefox. 2GB and growing storage in a single gmail account. Also, it's not like those that have gmail accounts don't have extra invites laying around. Mind you, it isn't quite as elegant a solution as some of these offerings, but the price is right and the storage space is always growing (to infinity + 1!!!!).

I know a lot of people that use their webmail accounts in this manner (yahoo, hotmail, etc) where if they think they need to be access a file somewhere else, they'll just e-mail it to themselves in an attachment. In all honesty though, the adoption rate for something like this for home personal users isn't going to ramp up until the average upload speeds of a home connection increases. Especially for large files, too many Joe Computer users are going to think their computer froze just because it's taking so long to upload their files.

Re:In the Clear

[Doc Ruby]

If I scramble my data with a password using well-examined software before I send it to the remote storage, I don't have to trust them at all.

Using remote storage with open-source local scrambling clients that many cryptologists have studied automates that process for the masses.

The security isn't a sticky problem. Publishing even minimally responsible journalism seems to be the sticky part.

No mention of rsync.net ?

[arafel]

I'm amazed nobody's mentioned rsync.net so far, particularly on Slashdot. Cheap storage, access via rsync, instructions for mounting it remotely on Linux/FreeBSD (as well as Windows), plus they've given some thought to both the legal and privacy aspects: "rsync.net does not merely recommend that users encrypt their data, but provides resources, tutorials and unlimited technical support for such usage".