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Online Storage, or Portable Drive?

Posted on: Thursday, 16 March 2006, 00:00 CST

By Aimie Pardas

LAST week, I read a BBC news report that Google is planning a massive online storage service.

Well, online storage isn't new. Just search for online storage and you'll be linked to sites such as Xdrive, Box.Net, Yahoo! Briefcase, iDrive, IBackup and many more. They all differ in terms of storage size, price and features.

For example, Yahoo! Briefcase offers 30 megabytes (MB) of free storage while Box.Net offers one gigabyte (GB), and you have to pay the latter if you want more storage.

Xdrive, however, allows you to test drive 5GB of storage for 15 days for free. And all offer access to your files from any computer.

Being able to save and share your files online certainly sounds appealing.

Currently, my data is backed up on universal serial bus (USB) flash drives, a portable hard drive and CDs. If I need to share a document, I usually just e-mail it over.

Likewise, information has been given to me on USB flash drives, CDs or simply e-mailed to my account. It's available when I want it and can be accessed by any computer with a USB drive.

And as long as I'm using a PC that's running at least Windows XP/ 2000, I won't have to worry about drivers and can just plug and play.

Although convenient, there are some problems with this set up. Some files are just too small for my USB flash drives; and with many flash drives, sometimes I don't remember where I keep the files.

Since Gmail started offering 1GB e-mail accounts, and with Yahoo! Mail soon following, I really don't need to create another copy of my e-mail for back up. Besides, I can also e-mail smaller files to myself.

But for bigger files, I will still prefer to keep them on portable hard drives, USB flash drives and CDs, and not online storage for the simple reason of Internet access.

It's just faster to plug a USB flash drive into the PC than to download my file from online storage, especially for larger files as Internet access can be finicky - quickly downloading files one day and taking its own sweet time another day.

There's also a question of security. If your document has confidential data, how much trust do you put in the online storage service?

So for now, I'll happily look through my USB drives one by one to look for that one specific file.

Source: New Straits Times

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