Vassar Technology Today | Backing up files without breaking the bank

Matthew Leung Columnist

Online storage used to promise convenience and freedom from physical storage drives. With a recent government push to justify airport security's inspection of your digital data along with your luggage, however, online storage is about to get a lot more appealing. A federal appeals court is still ambivalent about the innocence of Michael Arnold, a man arrested in 2005 for possession of illegal digital files. After flying in from the Philippines, airport security in the Los Angles International Airport searched Arnold's laptop and found the materials in question. Over the past few years, several other travelers had the same fate when traveling with their laptops.

Despite the increasing advantages and availability of online storage, the myriad options on the Web mean that methods by which the average consumer can store data are becoming complex and even chaotic.

Data can be spread out in multiple places online: photos stored on AOL Pictures, videos on XDrive, documents on Google Docs, homework on Vspace and miscellaneous files in the form of attachments in various e-mail accounts. Files can also be duplicated across these online spaces, and copies may or may not already exist in your laptop’s hard drive.

Storing data online inevitably creates some kind of organizational conflict. Synchronizing the newest versions of offline and online files is usually difficult. Google Docs (docs.google.com), for example, offers a decently sized space of 5,000 documents per account. However, there is no efficient way to upload large numbers of documents from your hard drive to Google Docs or to synchronize files between the two. Several third-party software companies are developing programs to do so, but they are still in testing phases. For example, DocSyncer (docsyncer.com) offers to automatically sync files between Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Despite these advances, synchronization still requires that additional software be installed on each computer with which you wish to sync files, making it difficult to work on public computers.

Other services, such as Xdrive, provide software to automatically synchronize files, but only if you are working from your own computer. It is also unlikely to be the only place to store your data, since Xdrive is limited to 5 gigabytes (GB), or the space of about one-tenth of a typical laptop hard drive.

For $99, you can upgrade to 50 GB, a size similar to a laptop hard drive. Other storage services, such as OmniDrive (omnidrive.com) and EmC’s Mozy (mozy.com) also have similar limitations on synchronization and storage capacity, with restrictions ranging from one to two GB.

If you’re talking about e-mail, Yahoo provides unlimited storage, but it is not designed to be an online storage space; you need to e-mail files to yourself (10 megabytes [MB] per attachment), and in order to replace an old file with a new one, you need to manually delete the old one and e-mail the new one to yourself again.

Security on these sites is also an issue. Not all online storage encrypts the connection between you and the server, making your files vulnerable to eavesdropping. For example, in Google Docs and Gmail, you have to manually type an “s” after “http” in the address bar in order to obtain a secure connection. Mozy requires a $40 upgrade for a secured connection.

As for the security of data while in storage, it is only as good as your password. If a hacker obtains the password through tracking keyboard strokes or with spyware, then all contents on the online space would be vulnerable. Public computers are especially prone to these attacks.

While more creative means of authentication such as pictorial passwords, eliminate the use of a single text password they are not yet implemented in online storage services. Offline storage such as flash drives provide more flexibility to security, such as fingerprint authentication, such as XMMicro’s Biometric drive (xmmicro.com).

Despite the restrictions and organizational issues, there are incentives to not physically carrying data with you, including the aforementioned governmental push to inspect digital data at airports.

The greatest advantage of online storage, perhaps, is not the actual storing of the data but facilitating sharing and collaboration. For example, Vassar's Vspace (vspace.vassar.edu) can serve as a practical storage space. Vspace cannot serve as a backup space to files on your hard drive, both because CIS does not recommend it and because it’s too small: you are restricted to 650 MB, which is the size of a CD. For the same reasons, Vspace cannot serve as the only place to store your files either. The most practical use of Vspace is file-sharing; try sending a 650 MB attachment via e-mail!

Similarly, Google’s limited space is only practical for sharing, rather than permanently archiving data. For photos, Google’s picasa (picasa.google.com) offers slightly more room than Vspace, one GB, or about 400 high-resolution pictures. For most users, this space will be adequate for sharing photos with others but inadequate for archiving photos.

In addition, online storage still has the bandwidth barrier: Only 69 percent of U.S. households and 15 percent of all Internet users worldwide have broadband access. While free online storage does fulfill the goal of being able to access your files anywhere in the world, it is contingent on many factors, restricted to a small number of files, and at the cost of having an organizational complex.

But all of this might still outweigh the potential troubles at airport security.