Livedrive

Livedrive pitches itself as an online extension to your hard disk, effectively mimicking your My Documents folder and storing it on the web. The service claims to strike a balance between a wealth of features and maximum transparency, which it does very well.

You can map Livedrive to a drive letter on your PC, so it appears in Windows Explorer just like any other disk. You can also use the service to share your files with other people, play music, video and picture slideshows from anywhere, and integrate it with other services such as Facebook photos, Zoho documents and iTunes. The software stores files both locally and online, which speeds up the process of editing them. There’s no automatic upload at the moment – you have to manually select the files to add to the system – but using it is as easy as moving files around on your computer.

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. But break the annual payments down into monthly amounts (either £3.25 or £7.40 for a phenomenal unlimited service) and it seems like a very reasonable price to pay for a service that lets you access files wherever you are.

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