Over the last few days, I’ve been trying out Microsoft's Windows Live service. Its a range of web apps a bit like Google are doing with Googlemail and Googledocs.
The first of these I’ve tried is Sky Drive.
What is Sky Drive?
Sky Drive is a virtual hard drive up on Microsoft’s servers for you to store anything you want. Initially, you are given 25GB of space but I understand that this increases when you start to fill it up. 25GB should be plenty for most people though, if my maths is right that’s about 5000 photos taken with a 12megapixel camera.
What can it be used for?
Well you can store anything there so the sky really is the limit. I’m using it as an offsite back up, so if something really bad happens like a fire or flood, all of my stuff is stored somewhere else in the world so I can get it back. Being a musician I have a lot of audio files recorded in my home studio and lots of other music related data files so I can go back and edit or remix songs that we have produced. I’m gradually putting these files up onto Sky Drive so if something happened to my studio I can download the files I want when I’m back in action.
Another use for Sky Drive is for syncing files between PC’s. Say you have important files stored on your desktop PC. You can have a copy of them on Sky Drive so that if you’re away and need say a Powerpoint presentation on your laptop you can get the file from Sky Drive.
Microsoft’s Facebook
Windows Live also has social networking features similar to Facebook, using this you can set up folders on Sky Drive that can be shared with your contacts on Live. You have complete control over who can see which folders on your drive and if you give some of your contacts permission, they can upload or download to your folder securely.
The Gotchas
One of the drawbacks is our UK broadband connections are really slow compared to other parts of the world so backing up does take a really long time.
Also, you need to check if your internet service provider places a limit on how much data you can transfer in a month. My account on Plus.net gives me 15GB of usage per month but overnight they don’t measure my usage so I set the backups to happen when they are not measuring my usage.
Try it
You can try Sky Drive by going to home.live.com and logging in with your Microsoft login if you have one. If you don’t yet have a Microsoft login, you can create one for free at the site. The service is totally free, supported by small adverts placed on your control panel
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