Windows Skydrive to upgrade to 25gig online storage!

If you don’t know, Windows Skydrive is Microsoft’s offering of free online storage – previously it was only 5gig but now they are upping this limit to 25gig, more than likely to bring them in line with other free online storage providers out there (me cynical, nah!)

Anyways I played about with it a few months ago and promptly left it dead for the following reasons:

You can only upload a max file size of 50 meg, pretty useless nowadays

There are no tools to bulk upload many files so if you have 1000 files to upload, you had to use their upload form which if I recall only allowed 5 files at a time!!!

There is no way to map the service to a drive on your system

I’m going to keep an eye on this as it’s something I’m looking at seriously as online backup, I’d like the following features implementing which I feel are definitely required in order for it to be taken seriously by users:

Remove the max file size restrictions or at least increase it to something usable

Provide an API so that developers like us can write upload tools that actually do what we want them to do

Give us a better bulk upload experience

Automatic sync would be great

Possibly built in encryption (although I would encrypt anything I upload to there anyway) – not that I don’t trust you Microsoft, but I don’t!

You can read more at the Windows Team Blog HERE

I’ve also just discovered Windows Live FolderShare – don’t know anything about it yet apart from the fact it’s about to be replaced by Windows Live Sync in December but i’m going to check it out and see how these services complement SkyDrive………………