Storing Files Online
Do you have all of your precious photos on one computer, with no backup? Did you know you can get a free account to store photos, documents, music, almost any kind of file, online? You may often send large files (like pictures or music) by email and get frustrated when they take ages to upload then bounce back, but with a free online storage account you can just email a secure link to your friends and family and they can access the files at their leisure.
If you don't know where to start finding the right online storage deal then we can help, and if you're not sure what some of the terms mean then check out the glossary where all of the jargon is explained.
Why Store Files Online?
If you're one of the 63% of people who only back up their hard drive less than once a month, or worse, one of the 23% who never back up, then you need to consider a little online help! Convenience is another factor - no need to send someone a large file, hoping their inbox won't block it, when you can just give them a log-in to your storage account instead. Storing online is also perfect for anyone who works on multiple computers (home and work, for example), instead of saving work on USB sticks or emailing it to yourself.
Storing Photos & Music
A 5 megapixel image or a minute of music in MP3 each take about 1 MB to store, so even presuming a modest 500 photos and 500 tracks in your computer that's around 2 GB of memory taken already - add to that digital video and you really need to think about external drives and online storage.
Some Thoughts on the Internet Cloud
Introduction
The Internet, of course, connects millions of computers – in the worlds of commerce, academia and government, as well as in ordinary homes – across the globe, and has revolutionised the way we do business, and communicate with each other. Anyone can, for a small investment, create a Web page, and gain access to an international, or global, audience for commercial, or non-commercial, purposes. The Internet has therefore become an universal – and indispensible – resource for thousands of millions of people.
What is the Internet Cloud?
The "Internet Cloud" is simply a metaphor for the Internet – not entirely dissimilar to other metaphors, such as "Information Super Highway", which was popular a few years ago – based on the way in which the Internet is represented in some computer networking diagrams, as an abstract cloud. There is really no mystery, or novelty, to the Internet Cloud – users of the Yahoo! online email service, for example, have been "cloud computing", or "in the cloud", for a long time already – but these buzzwords and phrases have become popular recently. This is largely due to the increasing practice of storing data – music, photographs, video clips, spreadsheets, etc. – on remote servers ("cloud servers"), together with applications that all the data to be used. In this scenario, local computers are increasingly becoming portals, via an appropriate Web browser, to remote resources.
How does the Internet Cloud Work?
Many services now exist for the storage of data online, and not only store personal, or business, data in such a way that it can be accessed from any Web browser, anywhere in the world, but also perform a daily backup for added security and peace of mind. Files can be shared amongst users, edited online, and even accessed from mobile devices, including mobile phones. If you want to transfer documents, or other data, from work to home, or vice versa, you no longer need to rely on USB memory sticks, or other media, which can be lost easily, and you never need to worry about running out of storage space on your local computer.
The growth in the popularity of storing music, photographs and other documents online has, of course, been facilitated by advances in broadband technology. A broadband Internet connection is "always on", so waiting for a modem to dial up, before you can access online resources, and to disconnect, when you`ve finished, are things of the past; so, too, is the "World Wide Wait", used euphemistically to describe Internet access via a conventional, 56Kbps ("Kilobits per second") dial-up connection. Thankfully, nowadays, any number of high-speed broadband services is available, and websites such as broadband genie allow you to check broadband availability, by postcode, and to compare different offerings, from different providers, side-by-side.