Microsoft is jumping on the “online storage” train and it was unofficially announced that their so called Windows Live Folders service is going into public beta. This online storage services provides its users 500 megabytes of space that they can use to store or share data online. Files can be uploaded with Internet Explorer and Firefox which surprises me a little bit. Well, the service was first mentioned to go public at the Liveside blog creating a big run for an account which had the result that the Live Folders website was not available anymore.
Lots of speculation began until it became clear that the link to the site should not go public in first place. Apparently Microsoft took the site offline because the public beta has not started yet. I was wondering about the 500 Megabyte figure as well because it seemed extremely low compared to other file storage services which offered storages of five Gigabytes or more. The 500 Megabytes have been selected to hide the real amount of storage from other services. Once the thing goes live the storage will surely be raised to a reasonable figure.
I personally think that it does not make much sense to use the service right now if you are looking for a reliable place to store your files. The biggest advantage should be its reliability but the meager amount of storage is playing against it. Once the storage capacities gets raised it should become more attractive.
It could be nevertheless worthwhile to create an account as early as possible to be able to start using it once it goes live.
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