Here’s something interesting I came across today: www.livedrive.com
Live Drive is a company currently in start-up; you can sign-up for a free beta account (not sure how this will transition once they are done testing, they will be charging for their service eventually – but I don’t know how much).
Once signed up you can download a small piece of software, once installed you will be able to access your online storage location by opening My Computer, and then opening the “LiveDrive” drive that appears there. It works like a USB drive, only its online. You can install the software on as many computers as you want, so you can access the files from anywhere.
Instead of uploading a backup like most storage sites, if you are accessing the “LiveDrive” drive and saving files there, it syncs automatically. According to CEO Andrew Michael, “It gives you a drive letter on your desktop – anything on that drive is then intelligently synched – it saves changes to documents. BT and other services are just web-based – you must upload the files yourself. This is like a USB stick but it is online.”
Another really cool feature is that you can share files you have uploaded (of course everything defaults to ‘secure unshared’). If you set them to ‘private share’ you enter an email address and it sends an email to that address providing a link to the file. If you set it to ‘public share’ anyone who knows your Live Drive address can access it (check mine: http://johnny.livedrive.com).
If this was a free service I would say it is the best online storage out there. I’ll reevaluate that opinion once they are out of beta and list their pricing plan.
Found via The Register.