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….