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 –

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….

If you’ve bought a BenQ camera any time since Jan 1st 2007 you’re eligible for a great offer from online storage leaders Diino – a 25GB storage account FREE for the first four months. All you have to do is enter the serial number of the camera you bought when applying for your account and the free storage is yours – it’s a great service too, not just for storing photos but any music, documents and other files. The offer is open until 1st December 2008.

Online storage specialists box.net are continuing to innovate by creating more ways to integrate your stored files with popular web applications. For a while now they’ve had an app for Facebook and one for Wordpress enabling users to share their remotely stored files with Facebook friends and blog readers, but have now gone one step further by launching OpenBox, a service which makes all your files available to use on a host of different web applications from just one upload. So, you upload your files once to box.net, then you can choose to edit an image on Picnik, use online office tools site Zoho to work on documents like Excel and Word or turn an image into a t-shirt print with Zazzle – other supported services include Scribd, EchoSign and Twitter.
You can sign up for a free box.net account here.