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Reality has its way of creepin’ up on Silicon Valley every once in a while. On Thursday, October 23, 2014, the Tech Crunch “disruptor” Bitcasa finally ceded to reality, despite a pretty long run of unreliably providing “infinite” storage. Unreliable, you ask? Read on ~

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I’ve got a lot of data. For me, storage is critical. As I mentioned in my previous article on how to archive large files on SkyDrive, sometimes I want to move files to the cloud for an extended duration of time or permanent archive. It’s good practice to keep a copy of critical data off-site to prevent against theft, fire, earthquakes, human error, and whatever other paranoia you can come up with.

So, since you’re being cheap and searched for free online storage reviews, here are the current best 5 free five online storage services:

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I was compelled to set up a file server because my clients maxed out their Dropbox. Originally, they were only sharing about 100MB worth of documents, so, I figured Dropbox was the ideal solution for them. Of course as they got real comfortable, they started sharing folders and moving enormous PDFs, .wav files and videos into the Dropbox. Needless to say, they maxed it out pretty quickly. I could upgrade their Dropbox, but then I’d have to upgrade everybody’s Dropbox and at this point there are at least ten different clients accessing the data at any given time. So, a dedicated file server seemed like the logical choice.

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Update: See our Top 5 Free Online Storage Reviews (11/1/2010) for more cloud storage goodness.

I’ve been in search of truly unlimited online storage for quite some time. I don’t mind paying, as long as it’s really unlimited. In my quest, I’ve come across a wide variety of services that fall short of their claims because they require the use of a proprietary client to facilitate the backups, thereby effectively making an online RAID 1 mirror. The catch is that if you delete something on your local machine, it will be deleted (typically within thirty days). So, they’re obviously not too worried about you using too much space since it is unlikely that you’ll have 100TB of data on your machines.

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I have a lot of stuff on my hard drives. Not all of it is entirely necessary. I have dozens of old 3d studio max files and other projects that have long since been completed or abandoned over the years.

I like the idea of having an off-site backup of non-mission-critical data. When I heard that Microsoft increased their online storage capacity on SkyDrive to 25GB, I became very interested. They have a cap on the filesize, 50MB per file. To work around this, I elected to use my favorite archiver — WinRAR.

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Imagine you’re trying to merge two partitions together using a utility like GParted from a live CD and everything is humming along nicely until the power gets cut. Once the power permanently interrupted the merge, Windows would no longer boot, and all of the important data on the drive was inaccessible. At the time I was performing this recovery, I was short on time and had to relocate. I had a quick flash of what had to occur in order to be able to recover every last bit of data from the laptop. I would need an SATA/IDE to USB adapter; a screwdriver; a few bootable CDs (such as Acronis Disk Director bootable disc); and a large external HDD to store the data that would be recovered.

This time around, I decided I’d go with Runtime Software’s GetDataBack (NTFS) because I have had such dismal results with other recovery suites such as Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery and a few others that I probably shouldn’t mention. After futzing around with trying to set up a remote connection using GetDataBack’s HDHost, I realized it wouldn’t work since I couldn’t even boot into even the most basic of Windows, nor would I want to, since it could conceivably corrupt the data on the disc even further. So I did it the old fashioned way, as I mentioned in my post entitled, How to Recover Data From Old Laptops, I took the drive out using my toolkit and plugged it directly into my spare laptop.

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