The Best Free Online File Storage & Sharing Service

Everyone needs one of these free online file storage / sharing service one of these days to easily send large files to your colleagues, clients or friends.

The biggest gripes with the many big names in online file storage services like YouSendIt, Box.net, is not the amount of space you can store files in your online storage, but the cap on the filesize of the file that you upload at any one time.

Even if you have unlimited amount of storage space like MediaFire for example, having only 100MBs of file transfer limit might not make much sense to most. I have felt “cheated” on several occassions by signing up for an online file storage service thinking that I have so much disk space only to realize later that I can only upload a few MBs each time, until I found Drop Box!

Drop Box

Drop box (Web, Mac & PC) is like an online file storage service on steroids. On top of a:

• 2GB free online storage (paid option – 50GB of storage space @ $9.99/month or $99/year) and
• unlimited file transfer limit (if you use the desktop client) / 350MB (if you use the web app),

you also get a whole lot of other conveniences not seen on other services:

Menu Bar Item

Download the desktop client from Dropbox’s main website. Upon completing installation, you’ll find the Dropbox icon on your menu bar where you’ll see how many percent of your storage space has been used, which files on your Dropbox you’ve made recent changes to:

Dropbox Folder

A “Dropbox” folder will also be created as one of your many folders in your home folder. This means you can drag and drop files into this folder just like any of your normal folders with the advantage of being able to access your files online, on another computer or anywhere else! Installing Dropbox on 2 different computers means you’ll see your files on both computers. I just love how cloud computing integrates with desktop computing

Also, your files are always safe as all data is transferred over SSL and encrypted with AES-256 before storage.:

Copy Link to share file

Here’s the most exciting part, right clicking on any file in your Dropbox enables you to copy the files’ direct link, so that you can send the link to your friends to download that file! Sharing can’t get any easier can it?

Any folders created in the “Photos” folder in Dropbox is a Gallery, right clicking on it will enable you to copy the gallery link and share it with your friends!

My public gallery from one of my folders in the Photos folder called “Pictures from iPhone”:

Drag, Drop and Forget

Just like some of you, I hate uploading huge files using the sometimes clunky web interface, talking about huge files, most free online file storage service don’t even let you upload huge files to start with. Dropbox lets you drag and drop your huge file into your Dropbox folder and immediately uploads it in the background (no filesize limit on file transfer). You’ll see a spinning gear on the Dropbox icon in your menubar indicating that upload is in process. A “tick” indicates that upload is complete. But of course if you like using the web app, you have it too:

Web App (AJAX goodness)

You can also access all your Dropbox files online!

Among many web app features, you can see your recent changes of your Dropbox:

Upload files through the web app:

See and administrate your folders and files:

Undelete files!

Isn’t this the best, all rounded and most thoughtful online file storage service around?