Tuesday, June 7, 2011

SkyDrive - Windows Live

Google Vs Microsoft in the world of Free Apps online

Most folks I know are aware of how much I like using the free online Apps (spreadsheet, document editor, drawings, presentations) from Google. Let me not forget my undying support of Gmail, and a few of you might even know that I use that site to upload and backup a few things worth having a backup copy of. Google offers you 1GB free, and charges $5 for 20GB per year. They charge more for more space. Microsoft now offers their Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and One Note and 25GB of space for free. That includes space for uploading your own files; this is that "Cloud Drive" thing you are hearing about.

Now I am NOT suggesting you put passwords, Tax Returns, or anything that you would be embarrassed to find on the front page of the newspaper; hackers have a better shot of getting stuff in a cloud drive than on your home pc. Actually, for stuff like that, I recommend a external hard drive or a small flash drive that you can put in a safe place.

Anyway, I do recommend using this thing for say wedding pictures, baby pictures, or anything like that which you want to not lose. This is just another safe offsite place to put them if your computer dies on you, or something else bad happens; say a flood or a tornado. Your boiler failing flooding a room counts, and that happens often enough.

For folks who like to use office applications, and don't want to pay the big buck for them, this is perfect. I would reccomend either google or microsoft's app to anyone. They both are great, but since microsoft has more free space, I suggest htem for now.

Me, I'll use both. I don't plan on giving up gmail, but I do like some of microsofts apps better than google's. Microsoft limits each file to being 50MB, but that should be fine for pictures and general documents.

I should point out that Microsoft even has a sync application which I have yet to play wiht that allows you to actually sync to it with up to 5GB of separate storage space, and this is without the 50MB limit. This is good, and I am sure they will give you more space for a fee. That would be a true media backup.

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