Microsoft is apparently giving away 25 gigabytes of free online storage. They’re calling it the Skydrive. I signed up for one yesterday and it works great.
I’m pretty sure this is the wave of the future for most storage.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
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Hmmm, I don’t know. While useful for traveling professionals (to ensure their data "survived" the travel process), I don’t think it will become the standard. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper (and larger) and with security concerns I cannot see people completely trusting online storage.
It’ll just be backup for non-critical data.
Though, one thing might be interesting is that in 10-20 years from now companies finding vast areas of forgotten storage after doing audits.
Large corporations and government offices now routinely have people storing their documents on company servers not on their local hard drives.
The benefit of having your documents online is far more than just when travelling. It makes your documents accesssible to any computer, and it also means that if your computer blows it doesn’t take your data with it.
Many people already do trust online storage. I certainly do. It’s safer and more reliable than having it on my computer. I might make backup copies on my computer, but I’d otherwise prefer that it be on a server so I’m never screwed; if my system goes toes-up (and all systems do eventually) I haven’t lost critical data.
The other big benefit of online storage is that backups are handled automatically. And even if your house burns down, your data’s still safe.
I’m pretty sure this is eventually how just about everyone will store most of their stuff. Its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks.
My next investment in computer hardware will be a top-of-the line Intel 64 GBÂ solid state drive for enterprise applications.
I don’t need massive data storage so much as I need to eliminate the mechanical gyrations of electromechical hard drives and the impossibly slow seek times that are their inherent limitations.
You would know exactly what I am talking about if you were processing files with 6 million records for move updates of customer mailing lists.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The downside, of course, is that it’s slow and relatively small. Still, useful for some minor archiving.
I predict it will be 90% pr0n.
Arnold, are you indexing on highly unique fields? You might try multidrive systems too, if you aren’t already. (Sorry, studying for Oracle DBA exam, this stuff just comes out.)
Flash drives have come a long way though. They’re going to be great for I/O intensive applications, esp. those with long seek times due to highly nonsequential read/writes.
If you don’t care about space, solid state is a way to go. It is faster and safer. And if money isn’t a concern it’s even better!
But maybe you just need a better HDD, Arnold? Is your current one IDE or SATA? How fast are the platters being read (RPMs)? In short: How old is the drive?
I’ve been using SkyDrive for a while now and its been great. What I find more interesting is Microsoft’s Live Mesh (http://mesh.com) which lets you synchronize files between all your desktops and the web interface.
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I’ll probably sign up for one, too, but I can’t think of 25GB of data I’d trust to a third party’s promise not to mine it for salable sales data regarding myself and my digital footprint, etc. It has useful purposes, absolutely, but it seems like a ‘great idea’ that is in contravention of extant and near-future technologies.
I don’t know that it’s a contravention of near-future technologies so much as a crude first-wave implementation of the near future.
Cloud storage is the wave of the future, I’m pretty well convinced, and is arguably much more reliable and secure than isolated machines and servers. This is just a crude implementation of it, as I’d be surprised if the back end of this wasn’t already cloud storage.
Hmmm… cannot upload an entire folder, only individual files. No way to synchronize files… If it’s beta they should just say so instead of trying to pretend it’s some wild new innovation.
Unimpressed.
I didn’t realize you couldn’t easily upload folders. I could forgive lack of synchronization since it’s probably the start of something they plan to improve over time, but if folder management is clunky and files can only go up one at a time via a web interface, it’s close to useless. Marginal utility for backing up one or two critical files, or transferring large files between people over the internet.
Oops, I see both John and I failed to notice Chad’s comment. Mesh.com looks like Microsoft’s solution here. I’ll probably play with it this weekend.
I doubt very seriously that this is the wave of the future. Â I had more than 1 online storage accounts 8 years ago. Â And they all disappeared. Â I see no reason to believe that something that was attempted and found unprofitable 8 years ago will suddenly be profitable when I can buy 1 TB of storage for 10 cents per GB, or 400+ GB worth of storage on DVD-R for under $20. Â Which is to say nothing of the massive storage possibilities of writeable Bluray discs. Â Those drives and discs are available today, though for a premium. Â In a year or so, that will be mainstream. (current prices – burner – $200, single 25 GB blank bluray disk ~$10)
And I have yet to figure out what people are doing with their HDs to cause all these failures. Â I have probably a dozen HDs in service right now on 6 PCs. Â They just keep getting re-used and moved from one PC to another. Â Of all those, I think I’ve had 1 or 2 drives fail that were over 5 years old. Â And not fail completely, just had to be moved off the boot drive.I’ll be curious if any of the more recent drives fail any time in the next decade.
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