If only my co-worker had known about i-drive, a free Web service that lets you “clip” Web pages and save them, permanently, to a personal storage bin in cyberspace. This is just one of many cool features that come with a slew of remote storage options for consumers. Companies like i-drive, X:drive, Driveway, FreeDrive, Netdrive and at least 20 others are each offering upwards of 300 megabytes of space on their massive servers, free and par-titioned for your personal use–whether for dumb things like capturing Web spoofs or important applications like backing up critical work documents, especially data-rich image files.
At the moment, i-drive is my favorite. The service has a unique feature that allows you to easily collect Web pages for later use. Using a software tool called Filo, you simply right-click on a Web page, select “Clip Page to i-drive” and within seconds a duplicate–active links and all–is stored in your private account. It’s a great way to capture Web pages that are dynamically generated (i.e., prone to disappearing without a trace), like e-commerce shopping receipts and the itineraries you build in the process of making travel reservations. It’s also useful for transient Web content: for ex-ample, The New York Times posts its newspaper articles on the Web, but they’re free to view for only 24 hours (after that, they go into a pay archive). With your i-drive, once these Web pages are stored, you can peruse them at leisure and share them with friends.
Other online storage companies focus on allowing users to upload desktop files to the Web. The idea here is that if you’re a traveling business person, it’s sometimes reassuring to have an extra copy of your sales presentations, which are often too large to fit on an ordinary floppy disk. The solution: upload to the Web, where the file is then available from any Net-connected computer in the world. X:drive, one of the first companies to offer free online storage, makes transferring files and documents to the Web relatively painless by creating an “x:drive” icon on your Windows desktop; it shows up in your Windows Explorer file tree just as your floppy and CD-ROM drives do. When you drop a file into your x:drive, it automatically syncs to the Internet. San Francisco-based Driveway does the same thing, utilizing a little-known feature in Microsoft’s Office 2000 application suite called “Web folders.”
Cool as they are, each of these services has its share of annoying glitches and ease-of-use problems. For example, X:drive and Driveway were inaccessible from behind my company’s firewall, and the i-drive clipping software doesn’t work as reliably as it should. Dataquest analyst Ron Jones says that every company in the online-storage category needs to improve usability in order to please the average consumer. He predicts a major shakeout in the coming months. Still, the advantages already outweigh the inconveniences. Go get your 50MB of space and start uploading.
