The Sky(Drive)'s the Limit

A few weeks back I blogged about Skydrive and how Newcastle College students (or indeed anyone) can claim 25GB's worth of free online storage. Well, if you signed up, make sure you re-visit your account soon if you want to keep all that storage space, because Microsoft are making some changes as part of a new pricing structure.

Once you've logged on, click on the "Skydrive's free storage is changing - claim your free 25GB" banner near the top of the page, or the capacity will be reduced to 7GB.

If 7GB isn't enough for you, you can upgrade to 20GB for $10 (approx £6) per month; or for $25 (£15) you can get an additional 50GB and 100GB will cost you $50 (£31).

(To put all of this into some kind of real world context, 5GB is enough space to store 1000 mp3s, 2000 photos or about 20 minutes of High Definition video.)

There are other Cloud-based storage services available:

• Dropbox is by far the most popular, attracting more than 50 million users who collectively synch about 500 million files per day. Dropbox offers 2GB of free storage (though you can extend this by recommending the service to other users) and sells 100GB for $20 (around £12) per month.


• Google recently unveiled their Google Drive, which provides 5GB storage for free with the option to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49 (approx £1.50) per month, 100GB for $4.99 (c.£3) per month or ten 1TB for $49.99 (£30) per month.


• Ipad users might prefer Apple's iCloud service, which also lets owners of the company's mobile devices and computers use 5GB of free storage, while charging $100 (just over £30) annually for an extra 50GB.


• Even Amazon have a similar service - their Cloud Drive offers 5GB for free, then charges $20 per year for 20GB, $50 per year for 50GB and $100 per year for 100GB.