Great when it’s for free - Review ADRIVE.COM

There must be a million sites offering free storage online, but not more than a handful which offer their services for free. Then I discovered A-Drive.com, which claims to offer 50GB of free online storage.
True to its claim, A-drive allows you to store 50 GB of data on their servers. However, you cannot upload files larger than 2GB, or more than 1,000 files in one go. So if you are looking to create a backup library for your songs online, you can do it on A-drive, but over a period of time.

I managed to test the site on both 256 kbps and 512 kbps broadband connections and found the performance satisfactory. However, in case of a transfer error, the web-based uploader on the free service does not skip to the next file and just pauses, waiting for intervention. So don’t think of going to sleep, hoping the upload process will be over by morning.

A-Drive.com has a desktop utility which is faster and uploads your files even if it comes across an error. But this is a paid utility and the free trial expires in 14 days. It offers three types of accounts, Basic (free), Signature (US$ 6.95 per month) and Premium (US$ 13.95 per month). In case you are looking to save various versions of the same file, a desktop utility to synchronise, or FTP transfers, you will need to enlist for one of the paid plans. There is a ‘transfer remote file’ feature which allows users to download files directly to A-Drive from other servers. Make sure you keep the window open if you don’t want the transfer to stop. I was able to transfer a 650 MB file in under 10 minutes from a remote server to the A-Drive.com server. I will think twice before uploading anything confidential on the site, but it can’t get any better than this for free.

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The above review appeared in the Indian Express, Issue Dated 2nd August 2009