Silverknife - Technology and Making

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The lynchpin of cloud computing in the future will be the possibility of moving all your data online, making it accessible from any computer (or other networked device).

Online data storage has been around for years, of course. Even before the wide availability of the internet, Bulletin Board Systems provided file storage for their users, who would dial in using a phone line and a modem and upload files either for personal storage or, more commonly, to share them with other board users.

But until high-speed cable internet became widely available, the time taken to upload even a text file or a low-resolution picture to a BBS or website was considerable - and expensive, given that most users were paying by the minute for the phone call. Now a large proportion of home and office computer users have a high-speed, always-on internet connection, online file storage is becoming a real and practical solution, and hundreds of companies are springing up to offer different implementations and grab some of the action.

It's important to put "high speed" in context, of course - most internet connections sold to home users and smaller businesses are ADSL - Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines - and the Asymmetric part means "Your upload rate will suck".

For example, Virgin Media's 10Mb broadband internet gives only a 512Kb upload rate, which means the average three megabyte MP3 will take about a minute to upload at full speed, and a movie will take over three hours. If you have a lot of digital media or just large quantities of data (and consider that an entry-level hard drive right now is around 160Gb - one hundred and sixty thousand megabytes), transferring it all online can take weeks of continuous uploading.

I'll address accessibility and security in a later segment, as these apply to all cloud computing services, and I'm not going to try to compare or recommend specific online storage options - this is a market which is growing exponentially, with new contenders springing up every day, and identifying the best is a fulltime job. I'd suggest you look at the frequently-updated reviews on sites like Epinions.com and TopTenReviews for advice on the best service to pick for your needs.

Instead I'll cover some of the essential features being offered in online storage, what's new in the field and some of the groups which I feel are offering particularly interesting or innovative takes on the internet hard drive.

Next part: Features of Online Storage