Jan
5
Written by:
mark.williams
1/5/2010 9:27 AM
Get 25 Gigabytes of free online storage space
Everyone knows they need to backup their computers, but almost nobody does it on a regular basis. What if I could show you how to get 25 Gigabytes of FREE storage space from Microsoft that you can use to backup your Pictures, Music and Documents? It is as easy as going to HTTP://Skydrive.live.com and signing up for a free account. Skydrive is free online storage that you can use to store pretty much whatever you want to keep there. Anything you store there is Online, so you can access these Documents, Music and Pictures from any computer with an Internet connection.
With the addition of another free program called Gladinet, you can drag and drop files from your Desktop directly to your Skydrive storage space, or you can set up an automatic online backup job. Now backing up your important files is as simple as dragging them from one folder to another.
Step 1: The first thing you have to do is go to HTTP://skydrive.live.com and sign up for your free account. Fill in a couple blanks with your email address, username, password and address and you are done.
Step 2: Now go to WWW.Gladinet.com and sign up for a free account here as well. Now you can download the free starter edition of the Gladinet client. After it is downloaded, you can install it, accepting all the defaults. You will probably have to reboot your computer for it to finish installing. Once you have rebooted, click on the Gladinet icon on your desktop to open it, select “Mount Cloud Storage”. From the Storage Provider drop-down box select Windows Live Skydrive. Click Next. Enter the Windows Live ID and Password you created in Step 1. This should create a Shared Drive in My Computer that you can now Drag and Drop files and folders to.
Step 3: If you want to automate your Backup, you can open the Gladinet software back up and click on “Create an Online Backup Task”. Now select the folders you want backed up, such as My Pictures, My Desktop, My Documents, etc. Once you have selected all the folders you want backed up, click Next. It will now ask you where you want to store your backups. Your Skydrive should show up in the list. Select it, and click Next and you are done.
If you open the Gladinet software back up, you can now click on Backup Manager at the Bottom. The backup task you created should appear on the left hand side. Select your backup job and the settings for that job appear in the right pane. If you want to change how often your backup runs, select Reschedule. By default, it will start to back up the folders you selected immediately, then monitor them for changes, so if you make a change to a document, it will be backed up when any changes are made to it automatically.
That is enough free storage to hold over 15,000 five mega pixel pictures or 6,000 songs or 30,000 documents. Now you have no reason not to backup your important Documents, Pictures and Music.
Copyright ©2010 Mark Williams
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2 comments so far...
Re: 25GB of FREE online storage
Great article. I'm going to try it now
By MSSBS on
1/20/2010 4:12 PM
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Re: 25GB of FREE online storage
This sounds like a great setup. I'm gonna try it. Thanks for the tip, Mark.
By SSarka on
3/19/2010 1:09 PM
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