I had my first experience with online storage site Box.net tonight. Back story: I found myself in a situation where I needed to share 5 media files with Ben that were up to 80MB each. Email was clearly not the right choice. Pando, or something like it could work, but I figured it would be easy to just upload them to a file sharing site so Ben could grab them.
I picked Box.net not because it's the best or easiest to use. I just happened to remember their company name from a podcast (I think it was an Om & Niall Podsession on storage). Box.net offers up to 1GB of free storage, so I figured this would work out great.
Signing up was very easy. All they ask for is an email address and password. It's very cool that they didn't require a ton of additional fields unrelated to using the service.
Upload time: things suddenly came to a screeching halt when I tried uploading my first file. It turns out that Box.net's free version is only free for uploading files less than 10MB each. So I had to cough up $4.95 for a monthly paid account to move forward. This also upped my storage capacity to 5GB.
Paying: This was surprisingly easy. The simple payment form worked great, and I was immediately able to log in and start uploading once my card was approved. This seems like a critically important feature that Box.net gets right since newly paid users are clearly trying to accomplish something other than administrative tasks when they're paying.
Managing Files: With only five files in my account, I can't say too much about the file management system, but here are a few things I noticed:
- Creating folders is very easy
- Editing file names is painless
- Tags (aka. "Keywords") can be added to files to help remember what the heck they are
- Files can be sorted by name, date, or file size
Overall, I found the service very easy to use, and got my $4.95 worth out of it tonight. Will I continue my subscription? I've lived without such a service in the past so I can't say that I see a big need for this in the future. I think I'll know based on my reaction to the first recurring charge on my credit card.
Wish list: One feature I'd love to see added to this service or other services like it is a video publishing module for video sharing sites. I'd love to be able to upload, describe and tag a video once, then push it to all appropriate video sharing sites like YouTube, Google Video, Veoh, Revver, etc. The time savings alone would surely justify the costs for me.
1. Posted by: Mark on September 11, 2006 7:39 AM:
Hi, all your wishes will be fulfilled if you start using IBackup?｢どｨび｢s IDrive Multimedia .
IBackup is known for their flagship application IBackup for Windows, which was rated by none other than PC World magazine as the `best all-around backup service?｢どｨび｢.
All you have to do is to simply move your music and video files into your IBackup account. On double-clicking on a multimedia file, it will open up your media player and starts playing instantaneously. You can even create 'playlists' or do 'shuffle' using your favorite media player pointing to IDrive's media files. Streaming of video files is also instantaneous. You can even use advanced functions such as fast-forward with near instant response. IDrive Multimedia supports all multi-media formats that your PC applications support.
You can also use Web-Manager, IBackup browser-based application, to play your favorite audio or video files stored in your IBackup account. You can play your audio or video files using the media player of your choice. You can create playlists and save these playlists so that you can access them later. You can also share your playlists with your friends and family. This is done by creating sharable links and emailing them. Web-Manager can also automatically sense the presence of images in your account and display an `Image Gallery?｢どｨび｢ option under File/ Folder.
To safely store all your media files, you can use IBackup for Windows and it works with Windows 98, Me, NT/2000, XP, Windows 2000 (Servers), Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2003 Web Edition. IBackup accounts are FTP-ready and they are compatible with most of the FTP clients on most platforms to ensure flexible transfer of files. Moreover, backups and restores are very fast with IBackup for Windows unlike any other service offering similar services.
You can map your online storage account as a local drive on your computer with an application called IDrive and with it drag-and-drop, open, edit and save files directly from office applications. IBackup also provides both browser-based and desktop-based easy access to WebFolders for easy drag-and-drop and direct editing of certain office files, including Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
You can Backup open files like Outlook files (.pst), QuickBooks, MS-Excel and MS FoxPro etc using IBackup for Windows version 9.4.7 or higher. Note that this feature is available only for Windows XP and Windows 2003 servers and not for all Windows operating systems.