Dropbox to raise bar for online storage?

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 12 Mar 2008 at 08:51

An innovative new service created by three former MIT students looks set to shake up the online storage market.

Dubbed Dropbox, the service allows users to simply drag and drop files into a folder on their desktop, just like a local network storage folder.

Any files added to the Dropbox are "instantly" sychronised across a user's different computers. So, for example, a digital photo dragged into the Dropbox folder on your work PC will be immediately available in the folder on the Mac desktop at home.

Dropbox's creators claim the service will eliminate the need for USB memory sticks or email to transfer files between two different PCs. It also includes a file restore function, that allows you to retrieve previously saved versions of files or even deleted documents.

Dropbox offers 5GB of online storage using Amazon's S3 service. The service has just been launched as an invite-only public beta, and although currently free, it's expected to charge for storage going forward.

You can see a video of the Dropbox in action and sign up for the beta from the company's website.

Last month, Microsoft quietly released its SkyDrive service from beta, which too offers 5GB of free online storage.

Google has long been rumoured to be launching a GDrive service with supposedly "unlimited" file storage, but after years of speculation that has yet to see the light of day.