Online Storage Services with Free Account Option

online storage
Having couple of GB’s of storage space online never hurts. You may use it for keeping your backup secure from hard drive crashes, or as platform letting you access/edit certain files from anywhere and for much more(see table). As a result of massive competition among storage offering websites, online storage became cheaper, more convenient and even safer alternative to other means of storing your data (USB sticks, CDs, DVDs, etc). There are many good services with lots of compelling features, so I decided to list only those that focus on file storage and also have free account option.

Storage Websites Free Account Drag’n Drop File size or Bandwidth limit Save direct to server Sharing option Read from server Auto Synchr.
AllMyData(win XP/2000) 1GB free(when you share with 10 Gb your space) Yes unlimited No Yes No Yes
Box.net upto 1 GB Yes 1Gb per file / upto 50GB per month Yes Yes Yes No
eSnips upto 1 GB No unlimited Yes Yes Yes No
Freepository upto 300 MB No unlimited No Yes No No
Streamload upto 25 GB No 25 per file / upto 500GB per month Yes Yes No No
Xdrive upto 5 GB Yes unlimited Yes Yes Yes Yes
Mofile upto 1 GB No unlimited No Yes Yes ?
Mozy
upto 2 GB No unlimited Yes No No Yes
Omnidrive upto 1 GB Yes unlimited Yes Yes Yes Yes
Openomy upto 1 GB No unlimited Yes Yes No Yes
Dropboks upto 1 GB No 50 MB per file / no info on bandwidth No No No No

In case you have something to add here, feel free to add it in comments or contact me directly so I can add it to the table.
Cheers…and my regards to TechCrunch that was source of inspiration for this article.

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Kaly

A father of two, neo geek, tech-obsessed male who runs the MakeUseOf Directory. He is also the co-founder of MakeUseOf and been here since makeuseof went live.

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  • zz December 29, 2006

    there is also:
    awardspace.com

  • zz December 29, 2006

    sorry. i thought it is free web hosting

  • tito December 29, 2006

    Nice article, but maybe you could add these 2 sites:

    http://www.4shared.com/
    • 1 GB of free space
    • Unlimited bandwidth
    • Unlimited access
    • No software to download

    http://www.eggdisk.com/
    •6GB File Storage
    •150MB per file, can store any file
    •Instant Activation, no waiting.
    •But no illegal content please
    •No fees, no catch, just eggjoy

    There is also a AMD version of the Streamload at http://amd.streamload.com/

  • tito December 29, 2006

    I should add that at 4shared the size limit is 50 MB per file.

  • Kalygul December 29, 2006

    thanx Tito, I will check them out.

  • Jennifer December 29, 2006

    There is a cool website for online backup info, articles and news:

    http://www.BackupReview.info

    Check it out.

  • John December 29, 2006

    It’s safe to backup all your critical data online with a pioneer service like IBackup. IBackup is like an extra hard drive right on your computer and it allows you to store your important documents and files securely online. It also protects you from data loss caused by system crash, drive failures, virus attack and theft.

    IBackup is known for their application IBackup for Windows. IBackup was rated by none other than PC World magazine as the `best all-around backup service’. IBackup for Windows automatically selects critical user data such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, My Documents, financial Files and other office files with file selection wizards. Advanced options include MS SQL Server, MS Exchange Server and System State backups. IBackup supports backups for UNIX and Linux based computers using rsync. IBackup accounts are compatible with most FTP clients on most platforms providing a powerful flexible tool to transfer files.

    You can also use IDrive that when installed maps your online IBackup account as a local drive on your computer. You can then drag-and-drop, open, edit and save files in the online IBackup account, as if they were on your local computer. If you want to safely store your music and video collection, you don’t have to go elsewhere. Try IDrive Multimedia . You can also use Web-Manager to store all your media and image files. You can even share these files by creating sharable links and emailing them to others.

  • Aibek December 29, 2006

    thanx John, both options seem to be good, though none of them is free

  • Winston January 2, 2007

    Mightykey http://www.mightykey.com – Used free trial for 14 days – 0.5 Gb Free – then bought product – get proxy browsing and encrypted data for $5 / month incuding 5Gb storage – fast browsing

  • smellygirl January 5, 2007

    Why did nobody mention DriveHQ?

    As far as I can tell, this is a great service and does also have a free offering. You can use it for file sharing and automated backups.

    driveHQ.com

  • Aibek January 5, 2007

    smellygirl thanks for the tip, I can’t recall seeing it before , looks good though. I guess I will add it to the table during the next update

  • Sami January 11, 2007

    Actually, best one for me is MyDataBus : http://www.mydatabus.com

    - 5GB Free Space
    - 500Mb file size limit
    - WebGrab featurem skip the download (if a file is available on a server, just put its address and you’ll see it on your acc)
    - DIRECT hotlinking to files (!)
    - Unlimited Bandwidth
    - Groups manager (site is mainly designed for students)

  • Aibek January 12, 2007

    thanks Sami, checked it out and looks really good, will be adding it to the table on the next update

  • Bobby February 2, 2007

    If you want to backup all the critical data of your business, go right ahead with IDrive-E’s free online backup.
    IDrive-E performs ‘totally hands-free automated backups’ of files and folders. The backed up data will always be available as ‘IDrive-E’ online drive on your computer so that it can be easily restored. You can backup any type of files with IDrive-E absolutely no limit on the upload or download size for backup and restore. More features here

  • q April 11, 2007

    maybe that also:
    jubii.com

  • q April 11, 2007

    Box.net limited to 10mb per backup file if right.

  • Turbinca April 24, 2007

    Pixilive is a free image hosting service. Upload your pictures, images or videos and share them easily with your friends, family, or on Forums, messenger mail, Blogs, Avatars, etc.. This service is completely FREE!!

    Image types: jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, tif, tiff
    Maximum file size for Images: 5 MB
    Video types: avi, mpg, wmv, mov, mpeg, mp4, flv
    Maximum file size for Videos: 10 MB
    Unlimited storage hosting period.
    Unlimited bandwidth
    No registration required

    Upload,copy codes and paste!3 easy steps & it’s free!
    http://www.pixilive.com/

  • stefan June 7, 2007

    http://www.mydrive.ch (a swiss web service, but it’s also available in english). there are not so much functions, but if you simlpy want to have your files online, so you can access them from work and from home and anywhere… then its really nice. 1000MB with no restrictions like uploadlimits or file sizes. and it’s free of advertisement, which i like very much.

    greetings from switzerland
    stefan

  • Aibek June 7, 2007

    @Stefan

    checked it out, works wonderful and provides promised features. I’ll mention it in the upcoming ‘extra’ post

  • KKS September 14, 2007

    Please send me links like 4shared.com which is free nd fast

  • Matt September 16, 2007

    Are there any sites that don’t require software to download? Matt

  • Aibek September 16, 2007

    @Matt
    Sure, there are quite many 100% web-based file storage sites. Check out ‘storage tag’ in our directory.

  • weaym March 13, 2008

    Windows easy transfer

  • RiRi May 9, 2008

    I dunno why nobody mentionned these:

    - http://www.adrive.com >> 50 GB

    - http://www.humyo.com >> 25GB

    -www.monogofiles.com

  • DataNest May 28, 2009

    http://mydatanest.com

  • DataNest May 28, 2009

    mydatanest.com

  • Robert Ellison July 13, 2009

    Hi,

    If you’re still updating this list I’d like to suggest adding Cucku Backup. Cucku is a social (peer-to-peer) backup product for Windows. You send your backups to a friend, family member or second PC over the Skype network. Our free product provides unlimited backup to one partner system – as much data as you like for as long as you like. We also have a Pro version which support multiple partners.

    We don’t support drag and drop. We do support both local and remote backup, locked files, encryption/compression, recovering deleted files and unlimited file versioning.

    Regards,

    Rob Ellison
    CEO, Cucku Inc.

  • AJNatalo August 10, 2009

    You should seriously check out mydatanest.com. It is actually a very good website.

  • Justin_Webb October 30, 2009

    Go through http://top10onlinebackup.com/ for the list of online backup service provides. You will get top 10 online service provider on web. My personal preference holds to
    BackupandShare.com, since it’s so simple to use and allows me to easily take my incremental backups which I can schedule weekly or daily. They also provide windows mobile backup solution free with them. I am very impressed with them.