Friday TechTip for December 5, 2008: Microsoft SkyDrive, Part II
Good Friday Afternoon!
Today’s tip is an update to the Friday, March 28, 2008 TechTip which focused on Microsoft’s Skydrive Service. In review, Skydrive offers you space “in the cloud” to upload and store/archive/share your electronic files. For instance, you could store all of your Office documents as well as photos, MP3s, PDFs, Zipped files, etc. Anything goes. The only restriction is a 50mb upload limit per file. This makes it a little challenging if you want to do a mass upload of multiple documents. However if you wanted to archive all of your Office documents and store them as a zip file, you could do so as long as the resulting file is less than 50mb.
So, you’re probably thinking “why is he rehashing this? This is so almost-last-year!” Here’s the scoop: earlier this week, Microsoft quietly rolled out a storage limit increase. The original limit was 5 GigaBytes. They have increased each user’s storage space by a factor of 5. Yes, you read that right, you now have 25 GigaBytes of “cloud storage” available to you free of charge. This is a fantastic opportunity to back up your photos, music files, or anything else you want to protect (as long as each individual file us under 50mb, yes, I find this a little annoying too, but still see huge potential).
To check it out visit: http://skydrive.live.com. You’ll need a Windows Live ID (either a hotmail address or live.com login) to setup your account. If you want to get absolutely crazy, read this Lifehacker.com post about downloading a free utility which will mount your Skydrive space as a local drive (it also connects to other web services including Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Amazon’s S3 Service, etc.) :
http://lifehacker.com/5100226/gladinet-mounts-web-storage-apps-as-virtual-drives.
Something New for Friday TechTips – Video Preview! Pardon the “ScreenFlow Demo” watermark as I’m using the free version to test it out.
Happy Last Week of Classes and Enjoy Your Weekend!