Recently in Storage Category

Apple slams door on HomePage on 7-July-2009: The Web-based page-building tools in MobileMe (the service formerly known as .Mac) will be removed. Any published Web pages will remain in place. However, pages can't be edited or deleted. Which means that if you don't want a permanent archive of a page about your cat that you posted 4 years ago in a fit of sleeplessness, now is the time to remove it. Apple no longer offers a Web-based site building tool, but the firm sells iWeb for Mac OS X for creating simple and rich media sites and blogs.

Apple is also killing Groups on 7-July, as was previously known: Groups was a way to share content among several people who would be granted pooled storage as well as a group email list. Content will be shunted to a Groups folder in the group creator's MobileMe iDisk labeled "Groups Archive". Groups features will simply stop working on that date.

Ziff-Davis is abruptly shuttering FileFront, a site for gaming patches, user-generated levels, and related content: With five days' warning, ZD is already dismantling this massive, high-traffic collection of gaming content. It's a very strange move, guaranteed to piss off gamers for all eternity. An effort has been underway since the announcement to download and migrate content. One user reports 48 terabytes (TB) of data were stored at FileFront. [link via Bruno. Thanks!]

The Ma.gnolia bookmarking system is unrecoverable: The developers lost both their primary user data storage, and backups were apparently unusable. After three years of operation as a free bookmarking site, akin to Yahoo's Delicious, Ma.gnolia won't be operating any more. The site's owner, Larry Halff, was able to retrieve publicly bookmarked data, and has provided that to users. But private information is gone for good. A recovery effort didn't work.

The 10-year-old Yahoo Briefcase service will close: With 30 MB of storage in up to 5 MB chunks, IDG News Service notes, it's a pretty old-school operation.

Briefcase users have until 30-March-2009 to clear out their luggage.

AT&T and Verizon bundled the Pro level of Yahoo's Flickr service as a freebie for its DSL and fiber subscribers: That deal is now over, and Flickr Pro accounts obtained in this manner will revert to free versions on 31-January-2009. Flickr Pro typically costs $24.95 per year. Flickr has always been relatively kind and generous with its behavior and storage, both before and after its acquisition by Yahoo. In this transition, they note that if your account reverts back to free after 31-January, you don't lose any data. While you can only view or download the most recent 200 images, they retain your data indefinitely. If you upgrade to Pro on your own, all your images return. Flickr also notes that if you had a Flickr Pro account and then activated AT&T or Verizon's free deal, however long you had remaining in your subscription will be applied. If used 6 months of a 12-month subscription, for instance, your Flickr Pro account will last through 31-July-2009 instead of 31-January. AT&T and Verizon both brand their services with Yahoo; it's possible there's a lot more changing in those deals, too.

I've been trying to think why the growing number of hosted service shutdowns has affected me so viscerally. I expect it's because some percentage of customers of these services will not find about the imminent demise of their data until it's too late.

A good friend of mine had a chunk of her life in a storage locker in the Seattle area. She went to get something out of the locker and found the lock changed--and discovered that all the contents had been auctioned off as abandoned. I can't recall the precise details: a check had bounced? a letter had gone missing? The storage firm said they'd done all the right things, although obviously hadn't.

That's the way this feels. It's as if a storage center had said, "We're going out of business, and we'll be setting the contents of our building on fire. If you get here soon enough, you might be able to pull some stuff out of the blaze. And, by the way, we've taken the liberty of removing all the tags from your boxes, and your CDs from their cases."

Perhaps this may be a requirement after we reach the bottom of this downturn and climb our way up: that hosted service and storage firms may need to develop plans for their demise that are funded through a trust or escrow arrangement.

The next time someone says your data is safe with them because they use 1024-bit encryption and retinal scans of all employees, you might ask: what happens when you die?

Xdrive: AOL was pretty excited three years ago when it acquired online storage firm Xdrive. So excited, that they created an option to have a free account with up to 5 GB of storage. No more.

AOL announced a few weeks ago, as part of shuttering of various divisions, that Xdrive would shut down and delete all files on 12-January-2009.

New files cannot be uploaded at this point, either. Billing halted 5-November-2008 for any paid customers.

The site provides a FAQ on what you might need to know. They aren't offering a DVD-burning option, which would have been rather convenient for those who might be storing gigabytes of data. Still, it's an orderly shutdown.

The FAQ lists several options for other backup and storage services. But they omit two you might consider:

Amazon S3: S3 is pure storage. Prices start at 15 cents per GB per month for storage and 17 cents per GB for data transfer out (from Amazon to elsewhere); tiers for usage in the multi-terabyte range drop costs. Inbound transfers are a flat 10 cents per GB. Some backup services rely on S3 on the backend, such as JungleDisk. If you were to store 50 GB, you would pay $7.50 per month for the privilege, not including the cost of moving it in, or outbound usage.

Amazon offers no interface for its distributed storage system, just an API, but there are plenty of clients that handle it, including Jollat (Java-based for most platforms) and Interarchy (a Mac OS X FTP and file-transfer manager). Several Firefox plug-ins provide full functionality as well.

Apple's MobileMe: While MobileMe is pitched as an email address, a sync service for desktop and iPhone/iPod touch information, and a Web/video gallery, it also comes with 20 GB of storage (which you can divide in any proportion between email and plain storage), and 200 GB of included monthly data transfer for $99/year. Storage and transfer rates can be increase to 40 GB storage/400 GB transfer for an extra $49/year; 60 GB/600 GB is an extra $99/year. That works out to $8.25/month, $12.33/month, and $16.50/month for 20, 40, and 60 GB, respectively. Not a bad price if you can make use of any of the additional features.

Mac OS X users get built-in support for what Apple calls its iDisk through a desktop shortcut. On other platforms, standard WebDAV clients work--Windows XP and Vista have native WebDAV clients that you use a wizard to set up a desktop icon for.