I recenty decied that I wanted to upgrade my hosting package. The FAQ’s recommends that you back EVERYTHING up before applying for the upgrade and that’s when I realized that a) I did not have a good back-up sloution and b) I did not have a file storage solution for my back-ups.

Since I work on gotfoo.org from both work and home I did not want to use a local storage solution. I wanted to be able to access a backup from anywhere. This lead me to invsstigate Online File Strorage services in search of a free solution.

The Online File Storage services are in a 3 categories: Free, Free or Paid and Not Free.
I like FREE.

box.net
Price: Free or Paid - $4.99 per month
Storage: 1GB
Public File Sharing: Free w/ Paid Subscription
Synopsis: The service is fast and reliable but the UI is way to Web2.0 (Too light and airy) and instead os removing features for the basic account they let you click on them and then tell you you need to upgrade. Pretty basic UI and features compared to others.

eSnips
Price: Free
Storage: 1GB
Public File Sharing: Free
Synopsis: The service offers an optional desktop tool for Windows users. A nice feature is being able to add adescription and tags to the uploaed file. The UI is very complete with date-time-stamps on Folders and well as files and very organized folder system. They have even gone as far as providing some default folders like Business Files,Photos, Images and Web Research.

MediaMax
Price: Free or Paid from $4.99 to $29.99 per month
Storage: 25GB w/ 1GB Max transfer per month
Public File Sharing: Not sharing sharing but you can email someone a file.
Synopsis: The service offers an optional desktop tool for Windows users. The UI is very complete but it looks likes it’s geared more towards company executiaves than the fun-loving social network junkies. 25GB is a lot of storage space but what good is it if you can only transfer 1GB a month.

openomy
This service or site or API is a little too complicated to understand which makes it even harder to write about. We I can tell you is that is a file storage service that relies more on tags as aform of organiztion. One of the turn-offs is the look of the site. It’s verybasic and looks looks it’s the first draft.

Omnidrive looks promsing but it’s in beta and is invite only. The appeal for me is that they have an API (or they claim too) and this could lead to some really cool mashups in the feuture.

Allmydata.com offers a different storage solution.
“By sharing space on your hard drive you can get storage absoutely free.”
Huh?
Here’s their example:
“You share 10 GB on your hard drive and get access to 1 GB on Allmydata. You can get as much storage as you want!”
So they want me to share x amount of space on my hardrive so I can get x amount of space for online storage?

Final Thoughts
box.net is a file storage service and that’s really it but esnips is more like a file storage/social network service; MediaMax is really a comerical storage service that offers a free solution to satisy the “if it ain’t free, it ain’t fro me crowd” and Orbitfiles.com is/was down and has been since September 6th, 2006 for a Server Upgrade.

One of the big turn-offs is required desktop applications to manage Online File Storage because a) I use both Windows and Linux and b) it’s almost 2007 a Firefox and some extensions is all I should need for desktop apps.

If you want more Online File Storage solutions options I reccomend checking out Web2List.com.