AOL xDrive with Adobe AIR
I've been an AOL xDrive user for some time now and have a tendency to try out all the latest online file storage concepts as they hit the web. Lately I've been so caught up in my web travels and testing out new options that I hadn't visited my xDrive account lately. For large email attachments the simplicity of Senduit has been a easy and quick choice to make, and uploading Powerpoint presentations into a hosted Google Docs file has been almost painless. The downside to Senduit is that the uploaded file and it's generated link "expire" in a short period of time and people who backtrack through emails and want to download the file again get an error.
So to have a more permanent link solution without filling up people's inboxes with multi-megabyte files, I revisited my old tried and true AOL xDrive account the other day. Much to my surprise and delight, there is now an xDrive Desktop Lite offering that sports an Adobe AIR interface. I'm still in the process of testing it out and am even using the VMware ThinApp SDK to see if I can create a portable, install-free version of the AOLxDDL application (I'll update you on how that goes later - I still don't have the Cisco VPN client done yet...). Anyway, the AOL xDrive service gives you the ability to upload EXE files, MSI installation packages, firmware updates, bios utilities, and all those other types of files you seem to need access to on an irregular basis. Once there the files can be private or shared with others. For ease of use you can group files together into a folder and share the whole folder instead having to mark and share each individual file. Also, for those files you need to save and you're offsite with limited bandwidth, xDrive lets you save files directly from the web to the xDrive storage, avoiding having to download to your PC.
I know, this has been another one of my "storage as a service" soapbox speeches, but one that should be taken into consideration. I also read over on LifeHacker.com that Dropbox, another online file storage offering, is now coming out of Beta so I'll be checking that one out soon as well.
What do you think about online storage and what's your favorite?
3 comments:
You might want to check out ElephantDrive too. They've been live for a while and it is pretty smooth for backup and access.
Hi Charles,
You should try out nomadesk. It allows you to create one or more virtual fileservers. You can share them very easily, so they are perfect for business use. By the way, the locally stored data is fully encrypted, so all data is safe at the mobile users' laptop. Contact us if you want to know more about it.
Best Regards,
Miguel
Try www.Box.net - it's a really simple online file storage service with a great set of collaboration tools. You can also use it seamlessly with other third party web apps like Picnik and Zoho. See why almost 2 million users love it!
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