I have an AOL Screen Name

Submitted by Rick on October 20, 2006 - 4:34pm.

Riding Shotgun with Rick

For those of you who have followed this web site and the show for awhile are probably wondering what an anti-AOLer like me is doing with a Screen Name. Actually, it is a result of a corporate buy out. Years ago I signed up for some free online storage space from X-Drive . Like many other tech companies, AOL purchased X-Drive since I had signed up for it. When I first signed up, I used the account to upload large files that wouldn't work as email attachments and then gave family or colleagues a link where they could download the files. I believe the limit when I signed up was 100 or 200 megabytes and eventually I stopped using it.

Enter my brother. He and his wife decided to purchase a new computer when their old one decided not to work anymore. Luckily, he had been backing up his most important data regularly thanks to the nagging of his older brother. During conversations about his new computer setup we discussed what to do about backup and he expressed an interest in online backup. I hadn't researched the technology for awhile and thought that with broadband speeds increasing and disk space skyrocketing, it might be a good option. Lo and behold my research ran me into a X-Drive again...though this time it was marketed as an AOL company.

I dug up my old user name and password from almost eight years ago and it worked. I had to agree to a couple of user agreements by AOL, but once through the legal ease, I saw that the service now offered 5 GIGABYTES of free online storage! X-Drive also offers a tool called the X-Drive Desktop that allows easy saving and retrieval of files from the online storage and a backup utility that can be customized and automated to backup your data any time. The X-Drive desktop slows down the system a little, but the backup utility seems to work well and I think that the service is a nice adjunct to any backup regime. One warning: you absolutely have to have broadband Internet access to use this service. It will not work with dial-up Internet services.

Let me know if you've used X-Drive or other online backup services and how you liked them by leaving a comment below.

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