Windows Live SkyDrive leaves Beta
Windows Live SkyDrive, the online storage service of Microsoft, has left beta status today and is now available for users in 38 countries including the United States, Canada and Great Britain. The limit of 500 Megabytes per user account has been raised to a maximum of 5 Gigabytes which comes closer to services like Aol Xdrive and even Google Gmail.
I'm not able to test the service yet because my country is not yet in the list of supported countries. The maximum file size seems to be 50 Megabytes which should be enough for most users if you consider that the file size limit is 20 Megabytes at Gmail for instance.
Windows Live Sky Drive is firmly integrated into several other Live services of Microsoft. Live Messenger users are for example notified if one of their contacts added a new file to their list of shared files.
It would be nice if someone who is able to join the service would comment on his experience with it.
Update: Microsoft has improved its SkyDrive file hosting service significantly in the past year. Not only do SkyDrive users get 25 Gigabyte of online storage if the yhave been using the service for a while, or 7 Gigabyte if they sign up anew, they also get a desktop client to synchronize files with their systems automatically, and access to an online service that not only lets you download and browse files, but also edit Office documents, view images and more.
SkyDrive has been integrated into Microsoft's newest operating system Windows 8, where the service is used to synchronize user account data between PCs. This provides you with options to sync data such as personalization options between PCs so that they are available on all PCs that you sign in with the account.
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There is an activex control that allows dragging of groups of files (but not folders) which is nice. Unfortunately, that control is only an option with IE6 … not with Firefox
Been using it since beta.
Its not so special. But 5G is definetely nice.
And the 50Mb limit per file could be annoying if you ever need to transfer an avi here and there.
And there is no plugin that sits on windows for like gmail drive afaik.
Works ok for me nothing great to really get excited about…. Its just online storage. Looks like MS is catching up, but not with any real innovations that haven’t already been implemented.
Hi I just tried it, works beautifully. You can creat private folders, public and “friend” folders (as far as i can tell, the interface is german for me, no idea what it’s like in english). You can upload up to 5 files and play a silly game while uploading. Well actually you drag a ball in a square window and can watch that boring thing bounce off the walls as you let it go (yes i know, i shouldn’t stress that thing, but it’s what annoyed me). However the service is up and stable. One thing that caught my eye ist that it showes actual usage in 0,01GB steps, which is misleading (i uploaded a few torrents 103KB in total!). I’m using firefox and unlike other MS-services it works quite well. Please correct me if I’m wrong on anything I’ve stated.