Stash Your Cyberstuff
Sun Herald
Sunday July 9, 2000
If the info in your computer has to be kept or carried, bookmarks are the storage solution, writes Miguel D'Souza.
MORE and more these days, portability is becoming crucial in taking your computing with you around the place. Do you stash all your stuff on floppy disks, zip disks or CDs or invest in a laptop and cart that around with you?
Things such as word documents, perhaps your CV, mp3 files, bookmarks, pictures and all the other paraphernalia that you collect, are the sorts of things that you may need to refer to from a site or a computer other than your primary one. You also need this sort of service to be free, because, hell, it's the web and it should be!
So where do your storage solutions begin? It happens most commonly with bookmarks, which is why BookmarkBox (www.bookmarkbox.com) is one useful such tool. Developed by a couple of uni students, who have since sold their idea, BookmarkBox is an online storage system for your web bookmarks.
Since BookmarkBox enables you to store all your browser's bookmarks online, you can access them securely from any Net-connected computer. There's also discussion forum and public pages, where users have posted bookmarks they feel are good enough to share. Public user pages are sorted alphabetically but the search function is more useful, because it searches through categories that the public users sort their bookmarks into.
A new function that allows you to download and either e-mail your bookmarks to other users or simply drag it and drop it into your Netscape bookmarks folder is pretty handy too.
But more and more these days, downloaded multimedia files, especially the dreaded mp3 file, are what many web users are downloading, playing and also sharing among themselves.
Driveway.com (www.driveway.com) is a useful tool that gives you 25 megabytes of storage space for any sort of file you want to store. It's easy to create an online desktop for yourself on Driveway.com, with the site especially useful for those naughty Napster-ing Netizens out there who want their mp3s available to them anywhere. Store your CV on Driveway.com, then access it anywhere you need to for an update or to print it off for somebody, or maybe even all those family snapshot jpegs.
Once you become a registered user, all you do is log into the site, select the files on your desktop you want to add (you can upload as many as seven files simultaneously) and hit the upload button. Uploading takes a little while, depending on your connection speed and the number and size of files you're using, but the system is virtually idiot-proof to use.
Its other features include a drag and drop function for adding bookmarks to your Driveway.com bookmarks folder, and an introductory special where new members automatically start off on 100 Megabytes storage space.
Finally, to tie up any loose ends with messaging, it might be worthwhile signing up to Mbox (www.mbox.com.au), which allows you to have online storage of all your e-mails and voicemails, as well as a fax service, which lets you receive faxes, but not send them (they're planning on adding that feature ``soon", according to the website).
There are a few services like this around the web, but Mbox is Australian-based and free, so it's worth giving a shot.
When you sign on, you get a voicemail number in the city you want (anyone outside that city would have to call your number with the appropriate area code) and an e-mail address, as well as access to the fax service.
© 2000 Sun Herald