I Forgot My Flash Drive

Whether you call them flash drives, jump drives, thumb drives, or pen drives, you probably own one {or seven}. For years, they've been quite handy when transferring documents from computer to computer, from home to school, from classroom to computer lab, etc. Flash drives are great until you lose it or forget it at home.

Cloud Storage sounds like something to do with weather fronts and storm systems, but it actually refers to saving data to off-site, online storage systems. Rather than save your files on your own personal computer or on a flash drive, you can save them to a remote database that you can access just about anywhere. Many cloud storage services offer free space (everyone likes FREE, right?). Most services will be more than happy to let you BUY additional space, if necessary.

Some of my favorite FREE online storage solutions are:

• SkyDrive - this file hosting service allows users to upload and access files from a computer; EM-S ISD employees have access to SkyDrive with our email accounts. 
• Google Docs - allows you to upload documents, spreadsheets, and presentations; users can edit files and can publish them so that others can access them or even edit them. 
• Dropbox - like SkyDrive and Google Docs, this online file hosting service allows users to upload, manage, and share all sorts of files. Although I shouldn't admit it, it really is my favorite. =)
• Office Web Apps - allows users to upload, create, edit, and share Microsoft Office documents directly within a Web browser or even on a smart device. These documents are stored in SkyDrive.
• YouTube - quite possible the most well-known online video host (Similar sites for teachers: TeacherTube, SchoolTube)
• Picasa Web Albums - Google's tool that allows users to store, manage, and share image files is called Picasa. The actual application runs on your computer and allows you to work with the images saved anywhere on your computer (it has some really cool photo editing tools!) Picasa Web Albums (PWA) is an online storage system for your images. (Similar sites: Photobucket, Flickr)

Other notable online storage sites include Amazon Cloud Drive (to back up music purchases and Kindle tables), Apple iCloud (syncs files, photos, videos, and more across Apple devices), Box (similar to Dropbox), Google Drive (similar to SkyDrive, works seamlessly with Google Docs).

What online storage solutions do you use?