Categories: Cloud ComputingTechnology

My files in the cloud using SkyDrive

I have been using the beta version of SkyDrive for a while now and I love it. I was a huge user of Live Mesh for its peer-to-peer synchronization capabilities. I am certain I will miss that feature but I understand the need to remove complexity and streamline features as the service scales to support 100s millions of users.

The Windows blog announced the upgraded services yesterday so I can now talk about it :-)… “Making personal cloud storage for Windows available anywhere, with the new SkyDrive“

I am paying $50/year for 100GB of space. That’s in addition to the 25GB I got for free so it’s not a bad deal at all. All my computers, including my iPad, Mac, and Windows Phone have access to the same files. I stopped using Dropbox as a result of SkyDrive’s new features and cheap storage.

Google announced Google Drive today. They have a very good integration story with their apps (similar to SkyDrive’s integration with the Web version of the Office apps). I am going to check it out. You can’t have enough replicas of your work 🙂

Cloud storage rocks. Plus… Jim rocks for hosting my backups at the other side of the pond 🙂 (and I am hosting his)

Update

You have to looooove competition. Prices will only go down. More features will be added 🙂

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about