Online Storage: The Next Generation

Features, Features

The first wave of virtual drives suffered from a severe case of clone-itis: Features scarcely differed from service to service. With the new generation, that has changed. For example, every service now has a different approach to file sharing. I-drive works especially well if you want to disperse files to the Web at large. However, if you want to grant password-protected access to a few people, Driveway's implementation is the best of the bunch. (When our office's wide area network was misbehaving recently, I used it to deposit files where a coworker across the country could get to them.)

Both Driveway and I-drive double as Web scrapbooks--you can snag any Web page on the fly and store it for future reference. I-drive also has Playlists and Photo Albums, which let you organize and enjoy MP3 music clips and photos. Granted, these features are fairly spartan right now. But they point the way toward a future in which virtual drives are as much activity centers as way stations for files in transit.

Then there's My Docs Online's wireless phone features, which let you use a Web-enabled phone to send files from your virtual drive to any e-mail address. Why most people would want that capability is unclear, though. (To be fair, quandaries of this sort are all too typical with Web services that dabble in wireless access.) And at least with my phone and wireless service, the process of establishing an Internet connection of any sort is so byzantine and flaky, it took me 15 minutes to log in and send a single file.

On the Fritz

If you ask me, the one overarching feature every virtual drive service should be shooting for is rock-solid reliability. Judging from my experiences, there is substantial room for improvement. One fine day, for example, I found myself locked out of my I-drive account. Had I forgotten my account name or password? Nope. The drive remained incommunicado a day later, so I e-mailed I-drive's tech support department. The automated response I received referred vaguely to "service performance issues" and asked me to try again. So I did--repeatedly--and another day elapsed before I could get in. Even then, the photo album refused at times to display thumbnail images. (I-drive blames these glitches on unexpectedly heavy demand for the service.)

During another weekend, Xdrive suddenly became almost impenetrably sluggish: It took me a minute and a half to log in to my account, and once I was in, icons moseyed onto the screen one by one, as if the computer were running in slow motion. Not until Monday morning did the service behave like its old, relatively peppy self again.

At least I didn't have any of my vital files socked away at Internet FileZone. A predecessor of Driveway, the service was shut down recently, forcing its customers to rescue their files and deposit them elsewhere. And you can bet that FileZone won't be the last virtual drive service to perish. To paraphrase what Pogo said about life itself--and despite what Web start-ups may tell you--most free Internet services ain't nohow permanent.

The lesson here: Technical hiccups and other nasty surprises are an ugly fact of life on the Web. So treat virtual drives accordingly. Don't store your only copy of an irreplaceable (or even semi-important) file in one; and always have an alternative means of moving files on hand for emergencies. My strategy? Driveway hasn't failed me yet, but I'm keeping a stash of blank floppies tucked away just in case. You can't be too careful.