Livedrive

There seems to be an ever-increasing number of places where we can store our digital files online, whether they’re photos, videos, music files or documents. If you’re looking for superior quality and are prepared to pay, try newcomer Livedrive. It has two price offerings: £39 per year for 100GB or £89 per year for unlimited storage space.

Features:
Instead of picking a particular type of file to focus on, Livedrive embraces the concept that you might be storing all sorts of things online – anything that might appear in the Documents folder on your computer. You can access the folder from any PC via the web or map it to a drive, so it works like an external hard disk that just happens to be on the internet. You can share your files with others, play music, video and picture slideshows from anywhere, and integrate it with other services like Facebook photos and Zoho documents.

Performance:
Livedrive’s aim is to replace your Documents folder altogether, not just run alongside it. This is a bold and ambitious plan but it’s breaking new ground by aiming so high. It stores files both locally and online, which speeds up the process of editing them. However, there’s no automatic upload at the moment – you have to choose the files to add to the system.

Ease of use:
The interface is functional but it’s not particularly attractive. However, this doesn’t make it hard to use – if you can use Windows to move files around and a web browser to view websites, you aren’t going to struggle with this.

Value for money:
Livedrive is bucking the trend by not offering a free version and this will undoubtedly reduce the number of people who will give it a go. However, it does mean that the service isn’t going to get clogged up with people on the hunt for freebies who don’t actually care that much about it. You also get things that you wouldn’t normally expect, like telephone support. Break the annual payments down into monthly amounts (either £3.25 or £7.40 for unlimited) and it seems like a pretty reasonable price to pay for a service that’ll let you access your files wherever you are.