Microsoft has increased storage on Windows Live Skydrive to 5GB, up by a multiple of five from its previous limit of 1GB (the 1GB having doubled the original 500mb in October).
Erick compared Skydrive to Gmail in an apples and oranges comparison last time; my Gmail account sits at 6.4gb today so Skydrive is still behind, having said that I’m not sure how many (average) people would use Gmail for online storage, so the comparison doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The more notable point is that Microsoft continues to grow its online storage offering when Google simply hasn’t launched the fabled Platypus online storage solution despite years of speculation and rumors. This is one space where Microsoft has the upper hand, and a 4gb storage jump will further increase the appeal of the product.
On top of the extra storage, Windows Live Skydrive has dropped the beta tag, and is now available in the following additional countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.
I have no limits to my Yahoo inbox…
MikeT
as I noted, this isn’t an email product, this is cloud storage, I only added the gmail reference as Erick did last time.
The storage is great on Skydrive, but so far they don’t have good interface upload/download. I once uploaded around 600 photos to skydrive, and there is no easy way to tell my friend to download, because you have download one file at a time.
I wish Skydrive provides FTP interface to make effective use of the 5gb storage
Ah, I compared apples with oranges too!
my bad.
I checked this product and liked it - finally a nice online document storage service with a web-based access. Don’t have to install anything if you are ok with basic functionality are not a drag-and-drop freak.
Where was it when I was a student and carried a bag with floppies with me everywhere?
hi, chinmaya, there is an ActiveX plugin from MS for IE, once installed, you can drag and drop between your desktop and Live Skydrive, very convenient.
I just used this last night and it worked great! Agree, the UI is not the coolest but it works. I had to share a 50 mb photo shop file with my designer and no email provider allowed attachments greater than 20 mb (Skydrive storage allows upto 50 MB per file)
Works great for me. I agreed with you Vens, on the GUI (crap).
If MS increased storage to 10gb I wouldn’t still use it;
I have issues with mail acc that:
Delete’s your account after certain period of time, last time I know was 20 days?
I took vacation to Hawaii for 4 weeks and got back all my emails and everything was gone, and then they offer you premium account in order.
I have issues also with mail boxes that:
Have only search option by name and subject line but not “text”
Have only option to set email to read and not unread
There doesn’t seem to be any information anywhere regarding sharing limits (if any).
Can you embed your SkyDrive photos on other sites? Can you serve HTML files from SkyDrive and thus host basic web sites? Are there any bandwidth limits for public files?
Anyone know this info or where one can find it? There is almost no documentation available pre-signup. And that’s a problem because I love not having a stupid LiveID/Passport/whatever but I’d like to check this out if it’s compelling enough.
To clarify what I meant by sharing limits above I mean as in bandwidth usage limits.
And where is the fabled google gdrive that’s been promised for years? MSFT upping the ante to 5GB. pretty nice..
Jesus, took me 6 tries just to get that damn Captcha right.
Techcrunch seems very gentle towards Microsoft (compared to reviews of some start-ups). Is it because it is one of the sponsors? Please, show some teeths, because you´re losing one reader here!
I don’t get it, you acknowledged that his comparison was dumb, then went ahead and did it yourself. Bravo Duncan: that’s *truly* reaching for the stars.
Is it MSFT day today at TC
It’s still a Microsoft product and as such needs to be approached with caution.
Tom
news to me that Microsoft might be a sponsor, and I’m not sure how I’m being soft just because I said the rise to 5gb is good.
Rajan
we decided to make it a change from Google
What does this cost?
The TOS section 7 (I think), talks about fees, trial periods, and such, but I haven’t found anything that indicates the fees that this section refers to.
Is it free? Going to stay free? Is there a premium for a larger account?
I’ve been using SkyDrive for several months and it’s worked fine for me. I’ve only experienced about 30 minutes of downtime.
I use it primarily for image storage for my blog and sample .NET applications that I don’t want to put on CodePlex or MSDN Code Gallery. I don’t bother running FTP on my main server any more.
No problems with embedding the images and performance of SkyDrive appears better than Blogger’s default image store.
–rj
Anyone know this info or where one can find it? There is almost no documentation available pre-signup. And that’s a problem because I love not having a stupid LiveID/Passport/whatever but I’d like to check this out if it’s compelling enough.
Microsoft rocks!
http://www.chai-yah.com
I come to Techcrunch for an op-ed take on what´s new in tech (I agree with many - not all - opinions voiced). I don´t care about copy-paste from a press release. The microsoft posts fall short! Come on, just a few ideas to explore: 1- usual MS bait´n switch (applies to previous post) 2- Does MS have an infrastructure to provide TB´s of storage? (vs Google having all their distributed tech, BigTable..)
Ups… looks like things are starting to move at MS.
Kudos
PERSAI OWNS YOU DUNCAN RILEY. IT WILL CONSUME YOUR SOULLLLL!!!
Allpeers.com is a better alternative for sharing documents. GDrive is offered for a selected number of users. http://mashable.com/2007/08/09/gdrive/ If you want to use it as storage you can use GmailDrive with Gmail http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm and it works like a charm to transfer files. Once Gmail and GDrive are there we can drag and drop files.
Tom, you’re pathetic. First of all, I’m not a Microsoft fanboy, or Apple fanboy, or whatever fanboy you want to call it nowadays. But SkyDrive is a pretty solid web service. With a whooping 5GB, it deserves all the praise it can get.
And this is from Microsoft. I’d rather trust my files to SkyDrive than any one-person maintained website. There are TONS of storage service out there. One from Microsoft is definitely something to be cheered on.
Tom, stop whining and go have some sex.
And folks, for those of you who complains that the interface sucks, you’re correct - only if you’re on non-IE browser. Give it a try, just like what #5 says above, use IE and login to your SkyDrive account, try to add files, you’ll get “To upload files by dragging them to the page, install the upload tool.”
Basically you can install an applet to speed up the upload process. Upload multiple files at once using drag-n-drop method. Again, only on Internet Explorer.
And for some reasons, the SkyDrive site loads faster when I’m on IE. Navigation between folders and files is faster compared to Firefox.
Great…my Gmail has 6.7 GB.
Why does no-one mention Box.net when talking about comparisons with Skydrive or GDrive/Platypus?
Box may only offer 1GB of storage (and I think it’s great news MS is upping the ante on this), but their interface blows Skydrive out of the water. Skydrive doesn’t even offer an upload progress bar for uploads which is a pretty basic feature with plenty of options available built in Flash, etc. I actually hope Google or Yahoo would actually buy Box, then increase the free options to compete - they would be getting a market leader and before anyone else has had a chance to pull away form the field.
Like others here though I would like to know about bandwidth/transfer limitations on this as I couldn’t find any info on it anywhere.
Tom #22
It’s news, I don’t need to revisit the entire online storage space every time we post news on it, but I take your point, although mention that to the trolls of late
Tim #29
We’ve covered Box.net and others in this space extensively before. This is simply MS news, not a long piece on all the competitors in this space, the Google reference though is apt in terms of Microsoft leading in one vertical over Google which is why I chucked it in.
SackofTruth #24
see my Twitter comment on that subject for further reference
wow 5gb that is so much…. gmail and my yahoo are both unlimited.
5GB is fair, but support to Asian countries is weak.
The increase is good and also the fact that its now available here in Australia.
Car 32
Gmail isn’t unlimited, but that’s irrelevant, this is a cloud online storage product, not email.
YDrive 33
true. Taken them this long to add all those countries as well.
I do also agree…SkyDrive is an online storage service, while GMail is a online mail service that lets you “storage” files and documents, but not in such a tidy way. Using GMail for storage would result in a little big chaos….
Regards.
I find the online storage space to be … strangely useless. When it comes to documents I need so little space that I can put them any number of places. When it comes to photos I want to share them mostly, not store them, and so SmugMug, Flickr, Facebook get my custom. When it comes to video, most services don’t let me automatically stream whatever I’ve uploaded, which is what I need. When it comes to larger files, my connection is insufficient for regular use, and my external hard drive far superior for regular backups.
Ideally, and please correct me if you think I’m nuts, I just want a copy of my hard drive which is accessible from anywhere, synced with my main machine, secure, shareable (in whole or by file), and usable over a 5mbit connection (which is standard for my various access points).
Anyone know of a service like this?
-Ian
I have been using SkyDrive and I have found it very difficult to use. I came across digitalbucket.net backed by Amazon S3 with really cool UI and full of nice features. They deserve to mention here.
well…great news, except it seems like its not available in Colombia as you say. was that a “will be available”?
anyways, cant wait to try it out
Well, I didn’t figure out all the features yet but it seems pretty simple and it seems cumbersome to upload many files as you are not allowed to select a whole bunch of files and upload it. The quickest workaround is to zip all files into one, but that is also cumbersome for when you want to retrieve a particular file back.
Maybe this will be worked on the future.
I’d rather trust my files to SkyDrive than any one-person maintained website. There are TONS of storage service out there. One from Microsoft is definitely something to be cheered on.
Seems like Gdrive will be launched very soon.
My hotmail account through officelive is 10 gigs and growing
storage is one thing. using it like a remote hard drive is quite another. getting 5 gig out there is probably not hard. using the 5 gig like a hardrive or collaborating on files, that is quite another.
Interesting… but I like http://www.xdrive.com. They give 5GB for free with aol account and you can map the online space to Windows Explorer as a drive. (X: Drive)
@IanDanforth #37
There is SteekR (http://www.steekr.com) that offers what you want, available in several languages.
“a copy of my hard drive which is accessible from anywhere, synced with my main machine, secure, shareable (in whole or by file), and usable over a 5mbit connection”
XDrive is also a good solution but it is full of bugs. Dot Mac may also suit your needs if you’re on a Mac.
I just used SkyDrive yesterday. I have a fairly strong tech background and it took some fiddling to figure out how to share a file with a client. Once I figured it out, we discoverd that clicking the file link would download a corrupted version of the file while “sending” it to your drive worked fine.
I have tried many remote drive services, including Xdrive. I haven’t found one that deals appropriately with concurrency so collaboration is a problem if you have more than one person mapping the drive. If you don’t need to colaborate, what for do you need online storage? Use a stick.
I have found Xdrive to be nearly unusable in terms of speed and function. Few others allow you to actually map the drive from a desktop. Even when you do get a drive mapped, it usually times out.
As far as a free storage place to share files SkyDrive should work just fine. But for any heavy duty situation, a VPN or FTP server solution is going to be the ticket. (I know, SkyDrive isn’t trying to be a heavy duty solution.)
Upping the anty? Good for Microsoft!
Microsoft is STILL behind the curve.
GMail Drive shell extension’s been around forever. Check it out at http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
I agree with chinmaya…. It has to have an ftp-like interface…
I have to agree right not MS is behind the curve and needs to make Skydrive mappable from a computer and I would think that Google would have jumped into this online storage frenzy that is starting and set the record straight.
Until then Xdrive mapped as an alternate drive on your pc or accessed via Xdrives desktop Lite Adobe Air ap will have to do.
Tech Weekly
The 50mb limit per file makes this not very useful for file storage but perhaps only image sharing and storage. There have been unsubstantiated reports of bandwidth limits of 1GB per month. I will stick with http://www.dumpplace.com 6GB of storage and 250mb limit on free accounts.
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