Buy Online Storage

Get 100 6×4″ prints including P&P for just £8.49 at Snapfish – limited offer with this voucher code SEPTPRINTS. Perfect for those summer snaps you haven’t printed yet.

To claim simply order your prints and use coupon code SEPTPRINTS at the checkout by 2nd October 2009.

If you haven’t joined Snapfish yet check the service out here – you can sign up FREE!

Another great but limited-time voucher offer from Snapfish – this time it’s 50% off Photobooks (in sizes 8×8″, 11×8″ and 12×12″). Just use the code SEPTBOOK to get the discount and it’s valid until 30th September.

If you haven’t done a Photobook before the Snapfish ‘Magic‘ tool will help you put it together. You can add up to 15 photos on a page and Magic Layouts will adjust the page order to fit them all in. Then if you want to shuffle them around it’s another one-click job with Magic Shuffle, and finally Magic Undo lets you go back on the last 10 edits on your photos so you don’t have to worry if you’ve made a dodgy decision along the way.

Online photo storage and all-round photo gift guys Snapfish are offering free post and packing as an end-of-summer special. Simply use coupon code SUMMERDEL at the checkout to claim your free P&P by midnight Friday 5th September 2009. Let’s hope it’s not the end of summer yet though – here’s to a hot dry September to make up for the barbecue summer that never was!

Snapfish have a special offer with original Christmas presents in mind, as they’re giving 33% off any photo mug – that’s where they make a mug using a photo from your Snapfish account, a really different idea for a Christmas gift, especially for grandparents, aunties and uncles etc if you have nice piccies of the kids!

You’ll need the voucher code from the Snapfish page here and hurry as it ends on the 2nd December…

If you hurry you can get 33% off a 2009 photo calendar from Snapfish. These make great presents for Christmas, especially if you take the time to pick your favourite photo from each of the relevant months for each of the 12 pages - Snapfish then make it into a beautiful calendar and send it to you. See the Snapfish page for details of the voucher code to use.

One online storage site with a difference is www.carbonite.com, where for $49.95 a year (about £25) you get unlimited backup space, but not only that, all the files in your computer are backed up automatically as you create them – brilliant. So once you’ve done the big initial upload upon signing up the rest is easy – you can also set times for scheduled backups if you think the constant auto-backup is going to slow down your web connection. Like a lot of the forward-thinking storage companies now, Carbonite are offering a revert to different edits of a document, in case you perform a silly change then save it, and keep deleted files for 30 days as a safety net in case of mind-changing or mistakes.
There’s a free 15 day trial – try Carbonite here.

Just been checking out www.4shared.com which is an online storage site offering 5GB of space in a free account, with the option to upgrade on a special offer for $39.95, which gives you 20GB for 1 year at 10GB bandwidth. Seems a nice easy-to-use interface and simple sign-up, although the expiry date of the (free) account is set at 30 days since last log-in, so I hope there’s an email alert – but I guess if you leave it 30 days then you’re not that bothered about it anyway. Worth a try I’d say, as with all of these free accounts it’s another place to store those precious files for free, and you can’t be too careful!
Try it now –

We may well worry about how to backup our favourite songs and family photos, but professional online storage is another world. To take an extreme case, imagine the needs of someone like movie company DreamWorks Animation, who use a parallel file server software from Ibrix to speed up the massive access requirements of their artists working on films like Kung Fu Panda, currently in production. The system has to cope with 75,000 – 100,000 batch-processing jobs per night, as artists work on animation frames for anywhere between a few minutes and around 15 hours, depending on the complexity of the sequence. DreamWorks’ Chief Technology Officer Ed Leonard explained;
“We needed super performance file storage and access so when 2,000 computers start asking for the same texture file for one of the characters, our system isn’t overweighed by I/O.” Scenes that once took two hours to create are now completed in seconds and, says Leonard, “…that’s pretty remarkable, and we’re scratching the surface on where we are going with this.”

Online storage wizards Box.net have added a beta version feature called Collaboration, in which you can right-click a file and invite other Box users to be Collaborators. All collaborators then see the file in their account and can edit it using the many features in Open Box (Zoho for documents, Picnik for photos etc). Everyone can participate in as many folders as they like (or get invited to) and even free accounts can have 3 collaboration folders. Premium accounts also have access to a version history which gives a complete record of all editing of the documents concerned.

Here’s a cautionary tale – running one of the top pub quizzes in the N8 area, I was getting ready to go out the other night with my 40-question quiz. Got the picture round, and the quiz… in my work computer, one copy printed – also at work – me in slight panic. The two best options were writing a quiz in just under an hour (a tough call) or racing to work in the hope that the cleaner’s still there – she was. If only I’d stuck it on Diino, box.net, Digital Vault, any of those, I could have had a much more relaxing night of it – all’s well that ends well but online storage is the way and I’ve learned my lesson….