Windows Live SkyDrive

Remember those old days when there were lots of online companies offering free storage space on internet? During 2000, I had uploaded lots of my files into one such net drive, only to find later that they became a paid service. Even though I liked the convenience of online storage compared to the problematic floppy drives (USB Drives were not common those days), I wasn't ready to pay for that.

Then came the storage capacity boom in email services and I stored all my important files as attachments in GMail, Yahoo Mail and Hot Mail. It worked fine, but was not very convenient to locate and download files. USB drives still helped but there were many situations where I needed to access one of my files when I wasn't carrying my USB drive.

Now I heard about the new service from Microsoft branded under the Live group. It was initially called as Live Folders. I signed up for the beta and after waiting for few weeks, they opened it up on 2007-August-01. I liked it immediately as it had a simple interface. Besides the 500 MB storage option which we can use to store any kind of files on net organized under folders, it also provided options to share these files to a defined group or public. That was an excellent way to pass on those huge files, when you don’t have access to the FTP server.

This week, Microsoft renamed this service to SkyDrive to indicate that all our files are there in the clouds of the internet. They have also refined the user interface and added support for drag and drop and the thumbnail preview option for image files. Let us wait and see how Google is going to beat this now? Will that GDrive from Google with infinite storage become a reality soon?

Link: skydrive.live.com

A sample shared file: