Buy Online Storage

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.

Thanks to Darren I’ve had more of a demo of Time Machine, and despite not being a remote storage option it’s pretty cool. It seems to me like having an infinite ‘undo’ on everything, for example if you’ve deleted something in iPhoto 4 days ago you just go back to that point (in your Time Machine, see?) and get said deleted file. You can do this in applications, documents, allsorts – check out the demo on the Apple site.

Apple’s new operating system Leopard has a feature called Time machine, which automatically backs up your Mac to a connected external hard drive, which is great but as pointed out in this article by James E Gaskin, if your machine is stolen the same fate will probably befall the hard drive and ditto if your house burns down! Now if Apple offered an online storage facility free to all it’s registered users wouldn’t that be a good selling point? Or co-ordinated a shared use of unused memory on the world’s Macs as a memory pool for Mac users to backup to?

I want to backup all the camcorder video I’m doing, currently on mini DV tape – firstly, I don’t want to keep buying new tapes and end up with hundreds in a cupboard, secondly I want it backed up as it’s all precious family stuff. Online storage is the obvious answer but when it comes to video there’s nothing free due to the upload limit for individual files, unless you upload stuff scene by scene which would be a chore. The Mediamax Elite deal is not bad, having as it does 250GB of storage and no individual filesize limit – pretty good for $10 a month, however I think even an advocate of online storage like myself feels the need for a physical copy of my kids growing up on video. Therefore I guess it should be one of the 500GB USB 2.0 drives on offer these days for anywhere upwards of £60-70, stick all the raw video on there (apart from obviously binnable stuff) and then backup up the edited highlights on DVD as well.
Check out the page on physical memory in the main site for the best places to buy memory…

I wonder how long the CD has left before it’s looked upon by the general public, not just by techie people, as an antique? When I think about my use of CD now compared to what it used to be there’s really not much action; yes, a lot of albums are sitting up there on the shelf in CD form, but when they get played it’s usually from iTunes, and if not that’s just because I haven’t got round to ripping them all yet. New music is usually a download (must do another post on a longer night about how much it matters, if at all, that we now listen to music at a lower quality of reproduction than we used to…)
I used to finish a track in Logic and burn it to CD to either put in another machine or give to someone – not any more. They don’t hold that much data, and DVDs are a lot cheaper than they were, so all in all it doesn’t look great for the CD – or am I missing something? Either way, when they finally enter the great museum of technology in the attic, I think it would be fitting to recreate the episode of Tomorrow’s World on which they were first displayed – smear them with strawberry jam and frisbee them into retirement.

Read a very good article by Rob Enderle about backing up files in the light of (excuse the pun) the fires in California – he goes one stage further than advising backing up your digital files by suggesting that scanning paper documents is just as important – read it on tgdaily. It’s a good point too – some of the most important documents we have predate the digital age, such as birth certificates, paper driving licenses and old photos, and are the most precious.

Phillips have announced a new 1 TB drive which uses an eSATA connector – reckoned to be up to six times faster than USB 2. I found some good info on eSATA here. Sounds great for video, but it’s a pity that Firewire is getting harder/more expensive to buy these days – I guess it’s only a consideration for people like me who have an old but still great Mac with no USB 2 port.
If there are any G4 mirror-door users out there who can advise me about fitting a good USB 2 PCI adaptor please leave a comment…

Welcome to the official blog of buyonlinestorage.co.uk. So much is going on now in the world of file storage, with new companies and deals springing up all the time, that the time is also right to check out what’s on offer for the customer. I use the word customer even though lots of what’s on offer is free, with either the option to upgrade to more space and better features or the chance to buy extras – for example the photo sharing site Snapfish offers free unlimited photo storage space as long as you make just one purchase per year, and prints cost 10p each.