Vinnys House of Knowledge

In a previous article I talked about surviving a hard drive crash. Here are a few tips for getting free space online to back your data up to.

I spoke about idrive.com, you can get 2GB of free space through them just by signing up.

There is a lesser known way to get free space by using a Google Gmail account. Sign up for a free account, and install the program called Gmail Drive that creates an actual drive on your system. This program is for windows only, Linux users can find GmailFS on the net to use. Gmail drive is as simple as running an executable then typing in the new username and password you created with Gmail. Once installed, you can use the drive just like a local disk. Google is currently giving away 3.6GB of free space and they increase it every day. The competition is fierce among the free email providers, so this space will only go up.

Another somewhat free (you pay for hosting) option is to use the extra space on your web site. If you pay for web hosting (1and1 sells 100GB for $5.99/month) you can use that extra space as your personal hard disk. There is a program called sftpdrive which creates a local disk drive and will secure ftp to your provider to store them. This means the data is encrypted while its being sent (but not on the server so be careful). Sftpdrive isn’t free, but if you don’t care so much about encryption, there is a free version called ftpdrive that works the same, just not encrypted transfers.