Online space offers many uses

Matt Leung Assistant Managing Editor

Vassar’s Vspace—vspace.vassar.edu—provides a free online storage space of 650 MB to members of the Vassar community. This amount of space may seem puny next to Gmail’s 2.6 GB online storage or AOL’s free e-mail account with 2 GB of online storage, but hidden in Vspace are powerful features not offered by these companies. Other companies also charge a hefty fee for services similar to Vspace’s free services. You can log in to Vspace with your e-mail username and password.
Host Your Own Website

You can create your own website of up to 650 MB with Vspace. Most other companies would give you a fraction of that space and limit your traffic (such as the amount of data that can be downloaded from your site). Vspace, however, has no traffic limit, although you would be using Vassar’s Internet pipeline and you wouldn’t want to be too greedy.

Your URL is vspace.vassar.edu/UserName/. If you aren’t content with that URL, you can reserve a domain from GoDaddy (GoDaddy.com, for as low as $6.95 per year), and then have that domain automatically direct people to the Vspace address.
Make Files Available to Others

Attaching large files to e-mails is never desirable. You can upload files to Vspace and make them available for anyone to download from the Internet. You can also restrict files to the Vassar community. In this aspect, Vspace is a file sharing application. But be warned: Vassar’s standard policy of copyright infringement applies to Vspace.

Be Your Own Administrator

You can control how others can download your files on Vspace, including who can download your file and how long it will be available. If the person downloading the file is a Vspace user, you can give permission only to that user to download your file and block access to all others.
A Secure Private Storage Space

If you choose to not share your files on Vspace and keep them private, then your files are safe. CIS recommends storing sensitive data on Vspace (as long as you exercise common sense). Under default options files are secured and not shared. CIS never monitors or accesses your personal data (except in rare circumstances, but only with approval of administrators). CIS does not recommend using Vspace as a backup or the only medium to store data, though it does regularly backup data on Vspace.

A Virtual Hard Drive

You can mount Vspace and use it like a regular folder on your computer. The free application Goliath (for Macs, webdav.org/goliath) can emulate Vspace as a drive on your computer, and it is the only way to mount Vspace in Mac OS versions earlier than 10.4. Once mounted, you can access any application on your computer just like any other regular folder on your computer.

For more information, go to the Vspace website, vspace.vassar.edu.