Technology: The online safety-deposit box
Imagine you could lock away your valuables for free, as if banks suddenly went wacko and didn't charge for a safety-deposit box. Oh, wait (there's always a catch, isn't there?)—they would charge you if you wanted your diamonds and savings bonds back.
That's the unusual idea behind streamload.com, an online service that offers everyone free digital storage. You pay only if you want to download the files you put there. The online service offers 10 gigabytes of storage free of charge, which can hold about 10,000 digital photos of decent quality. The trick is you can download only a sampling of your stored files for free—100 megabytes a month, or about 100 photos. If you want them all back, say if your hard drive crashes, you just pay $10 a month to recover all 10 gigs.
Admit it: You're a slacker when it comes to backing up your home PC. But now you're putting at risk irreplaceable memories—the digital photos that fill your hard drive. Even storage options like CD-ROMs aren't safe from scratches and fires, and a number of online services like xdrive.com and bigvault.com offer an easy way to get what the pros call "off-site storage." But nobody offers so much storage for so little as Streamload does.
There are limits. You're entrusting data to strangers, so look at it as backup or convenience, not primary storage for irreplaceable files. Also, even with broadband, it can take a day to upload 1 gigabyte (downloads are faster), and some Internet providers limit transfers so you don't hog bandwidth.
Once the data are uploaded, even free Streamload accounts also can, er, stream music or video files, so you can upload MP3 files and listen to them anywhere.
Need more room than 10 gig? All paid Streamload accounts come with unlimited storage and start at $5 a month for 1 gig of downloads. Paid accounts have other benefits, like making it easy to send a huge file that would choke conventional E-mail accounts. The Streamload folks figure the free account is a loss leader, and you'll pay for more. I mean, it's not like they're wacko or something.
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