Last week Microsoft upped the online SkyDrive storage capacity to 5 GB and several folks asked if you could mount the space like a network drive. Unfortunately, that functionality doesn’t exist yet although I suspect that will change in the future… just a guess, of course. Xdrive from AOL (yes, AOL!) offers the same amount of free storage and PC users actually can use the space as a virtual hard drive by using the Xdrive Desktop client software. You can drag & drop files to it, schedule backups and more with the full client. I just installed it on an XP machine and was able to connect and map a virtual drive that appears like a network drive in Windows Explorer. I called it my "J:" drive… too bad I can’t have two accounts so I could have a "J:" and a "K:" drive…
Folks that just want simple to access anywhere free storage can just use the new Xdrive Desktop Lite application, which is built on the Adobe AIR platform, making it usable across PC, Mac and Linux systems. Of course, a good browser will offer much of the same, but this gives you several interface choices to access your Xdrive. There’s no credit card needed to sign up for the free 5GB of space but if you need more capacity, 50 GB will set you back $9.95 a month. The cloud ain’t cheap people! ;)
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