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Storage on the Net
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Imagine having your own private disk space on the Web! It is a great idea -- but soon you may have to pay for the privilege. A guide to the few virtual disk options that still remain free.
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IT HAPPENED recently. An IT professional who gives a lot of lectures supported by Powerpoint presentations, carried his material on CDs. When he reached the venue, he opened his CD jewel case and discovered to his horror that it was empty.
The CD was still sitting on the drive of his home PC, at the other end of the country, where he had forgotten to remove it.
The hall was full. He was due to start his lecture in fifteen minutes-- what could he do to avoid a severe embarrassment?
Thanks to one of the most innovative and useful features on the Internet, he could access his entire Powerpoint file within a couple of minutes. How did he do it?
He had taken the routine precaution before he left home, of copying the PPT file into his "Virtual Hard Disk'' — the approximately 100 megabytes (MB) of space that was his own, on the Web.
He did this because his audience often requested him to provide a soft copy of his talks — and rather that cluttering his email, replying to dozens of such requests, he could say "I have put it in my Web drive. You can download it from there!''
Now the habit paid off as he was able to go on the Internet, access his own presentation and download it to the PC hard drive of the lecture organisers. With a minute or two to spare, he was all set to give his illustrated lecture.
What is the feature that came to his rescue? It is something is being variously called "Virtual Disk Drive", "Web Disk Space", "Virtual File System", or Internet Hard Drive. What this means is that you can have your own private space on a website, usually tens or hundreds of MB in size, in which you can store your important files, pictures, movie clips or whatever. Why would one want an Internet storage space when hard disk space on PCs, these days, comes in much larger sizes — 40 gigabytes (GB) or more? There are some good, practical reasons. You can access your files where ever you are, when ever you want to.
You can allow friends to look at your files — or keep some of them private. Just think of a wedding or some such even where you have taken a large number of photos, maybe even a short video, which you want to share with relatives all over the world. Why send bulky emails to all of them -- when you can post them in your Web disk and authorise them to see the contents at their convenience?
The advantages of the system was touted by dozens of Internet services who offered free virtual disk space at their sites. Some of the better known names were XDrive, DiskWise and FreeDrive among others. Unfortunately the last year has seen the majority of these free drive space offers withdrawn, to be replaced by ''pay'' schemes where you are required to shell out anything from $ 10 to $ 50 per month to maintain your virtual hard drive. Indeed, many IT watchers have already written obituaries for the free hard drive concept.
But all is not lost! After many hours of ploughing through online hard drive sites, this column is able to point readers at a few which are still available free.
So if the idea suits your style, you might look at the following sites, which continue to offer varying amounts of web-based file space without charge:
One of the smallest spaces available free, comes from the Yahoo search engine.
You need to register as a Yahoo user (maybe you are already a use of their email service). If you are a first timer, you can go directly to briefcase.yahoo.com and apply for your own free space of 25 MB.
Be warned that currently there seems to be some short term problem -- and that even after registering for you own briefcase, you may not be able to operate it because a notice asks you to try after some time. It happened to this writer last week. However most directories of free hard drives assure that the Yahoo service is still open.
Another free storage site still operational is kturn.com. It claims that it is dedicated to providing the largest possible storage capacity to the public -- and offers 125 MB per person. KTurn says it is striving to become the first provider of 1 GB on the Web!
In the course of surfing the Web's storage freebies, another jumbo site popped up: zden.com offers 500 MB of free space — but there's a difference: this is not space to store what you like but a virtual shopping mall: you can use the space to display files, software, pictures... that you must offer for sale. The site checks the items offered, then indexes them so that "shoppers" can find what they are looking for.
There could be a few more free spaces available, which we failed to locate — and tomorrow even the ones currently "free" may become "fee".
But why worry about that: tomorrow's another day!
A. VISHNU
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