SkyDrive Now Offers 5 GB
Posted: 12 September 2008
The best things in life, they say, are free. I had signed up for Windows Live SkyDrive last year when I was looking for a safe place to cache my important files and documents, for free. At the time, SkyDrive was in beta testing, I guess. I had read about it in a technology magazine. Nothing worth noting at first: they offered a measly 500 MB of storage space. But even Gmail provided more space! One fine day, the 500 MB doubled to 1 GB. Atleast now we were getting somewhere…Today, SkyDrive offers a mammoth 5 GB of free storage space, and not only that, it also incorporates features like password protection and file sharing. You can use it to store any and everything. I logged in about a week ago and was quite surprised to see a “4.97 GB of 5 GB remaining” message in the control panel. I would like to walkthrough a few features of this superb service for the benefit of all.
To get using the service, simply navigate to http://skydrive.live.com/ and click on “Sign in” on the right top corner. You’re good to go if you have a Hotmail ID or an MSN Messenger account, which you can use to login. If you don’t, you’ll have to create one to use with this service. The registration process is as usual. Once you’ve logged in, you can personalize your account, create your own folders, attach your photograph and enter your details to make it look like mine:
There are three types of folders in SkyDrive:
(I) Personal: These folders are private and are accessible only by you after logging into SkyDrive. They are invisible to external users in all ways. You can use the default folders provided or create new ones as needed. Use these to store sensitive data and protect it from prying eyes.
(II) Shared: Shared folders are useful in many ways. For example, working on projects where files are needed to be accessed by only team members and not the general public.
(III) Public: These folders are accessible by everyone, in the sense that you can link to them by pasting the URL on your webpage or blog or whatever. See the screenshot below:
It shows a sample file I uploaded. A web address is provided that you can use to link to it. So if you want to make a file public and want users to link to it, just send them the web address. They can only read / download the files, and cannot modify them in any way. I currently store my resume, and also some other essential documents here. At present, the upload size limit is 50MB: quite convenient I felt for most (legal) purposes.
SkyDrive is quite useful in that you can access any stored file on any computer. The only requirements are IE 6+ or Firefox 1.5+ and a reasonably decent Internet connection. There are a lot of other options and uses you can put this great service to. And a number of improvements are announced for the coming months. Watch out!
