Do you remember CompuServe? Back in the day, by which I mean before the beginning of life as we know it … by which I mean before everyone and his brother got online, CompuServe was “it”. In fact, CompuServe, which started in 1969, was actually the first online service offering bulletin boards, chat services, and file archives via dial-up service.
By the time the Internet appeared, CompuServ was a behemoth but the rise of the Web killed the company off, in part, because they hit an innovation “wall”. They had this huge infrastructure and ways of doing business that just couldn’t adapt fast enough to survive and in a series of business deals beginning in the late ’90s, the company was eventually subsumed by AOL and essentially buried by the mid oughts.
Now, in 1994 I wrote a book called “Navigating the Internet” which was one of the very first in-depth tomes about what was then the nascent global Internet. So, in late ’94 or ’95 (I forget which) I had enough street cred to get a load of CompuServe executives on the phone and I pitched them an idea. The concept was to sell subscriptions for online archival storage to computer users but, alas, either I didn’t pitch the business opportunity well enough or they just didn’t get it (guess which explanation I prefer) and as a result nothing came of it.
Fast forward to today and there’s now a huge online backup and archival storage market and it’s a service that has become extremely reasonably priced (by which I mean “cheap”). There are two economic drivers behind this market: First, storage continues to plummet in price. Second, online storage has become a commodity service due to the number of competitors.
Today, the cost of online storage from many online storage and archive companies is less than $0.10 per GB or, as in the case of my focus today, Livedrive, effectively zero.
Yep, Livedrive provides an online backup and archive service with unlimited storage and, and this is important, without bandwidth caps!
After you install the Livedrive software on Windows, OS X (in beta release, which some users report to be buggy), or iOS you can have your files continuously and securely backed up (Livedrive uses 256-bit AES), with up to 30 sequential versions being retained.
What makes Livedrive appropriate for the Network World Web Applications Alert newsletter is the excellent Web interface the service provides.
This UI provides a view into all computers on which you have installed and configured the Livedrive software and allows you to browse online files, upload and download files, recover previous versions, preview and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files as well OpenOffice Text, Presentation, and Spreadsheet documents, plain text files, and JPEG images. You can also stream music you’ve stored on Livedrive.
You can email files to Livedrive, use FTP to access your storage, and add and delete files from your Livedrive Briefcase, a 2TB storage area that gets synchronized between all machines in your account (you can also pay for more Briefcase storage).
The Web interface also allows you to share your files with online either privately or publicly.
Current pricing for Livedrive is $6.95 per month for a single computer without Briefcase and $16.95 per month for three computers with Briefcase with discounts for annual subscriptions.
Livedrive is impressive because it is simple to use, has a great feature set, unlimited storage, and a really effective Web interface.
Ah, if only those CompuServe executives had listened, where would they be today?
