storage

DPhoto is a photo-hosting and sharing service that uses a Flash interface for both organizing and sharing photos. It's no Flickr-killer in terms of price or community features, but it's got a really easy to use uploader, and the slide shows look great. Give it a look if you want to make a cool-looking slide show or gallery with a few of your photos.

Adding your shots to DPhoto is very user friendly. The uploader tool lets you pick out your photos one at a time or select entire folders on your hard drive. There's also a custom e-mail address that lets you send pictures from your phone.

The free version of DPhoto is limited to 100 photos, and also limits individual file size to 3MB, which is about the size of most people's photos, assuming they're shooting in something around the 5-megapixel range. DPhoto charges $2 a month to upgrade to their Lite account (and $7 for Pro), which is on the steep side. Both premium-level accounts net you the option to upload more shots. The Pro level account increases the cap on individual photo-file uploads from 3MB to 20MB, and lets users download entire photo albums as .ZIP files, which is handy if you intend on using DPhoto as a business tool.

I can't wholly recommend using DPhoto over some of the more established photo-hosting services, especially since at $84 a year, the Pro subscription is a hard sell over typical mainstream photo services (Flickr, Fotki, SmugMug) that come in at about $25 to $50 a year. I'd like to see them build on the looks with a little more backing on the community and support. The service is a still a little rough around the edges and certainly is capable of improving its offerings in both departments. Either way, the site navigation and photo browsing are very well designed, making it a joy to use.

For more shots of the interface, keep reading, or give DPhoto's sample gallery a look.… Read more

If you're the owner of a blog, there's a chance that, come one day, you might lose some or all of your posts. In order to avoid this, there's BlogBackupOnline, a free solution that will grab everything you've ever done and make a backup of it off site.

Registering your blog (or anyone else's for that matter) is easy, just give it the URL, and if the site is on a popular blogging platform like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress, it will start backing up posts right away. You don't actually need to give it … Read more

That darned hard drive industry just keeps giving us excuses not to weed out all those old files on the laptop.

Samsung on Wednesday announced a new 2.5-inch hard drive, taking a step ahead of the herd with a 200GB model with a 7200rpm rotation speed.

The SpinPoint MP1 line also will be available in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities when it begins shipping in May, the Korean electronics giant said. The drives use a 3-gigabit-per-second SATA connection and will have 8MB or 16MB of cache memory.

Faster rotational speeds allow drives to find data more quickly and transfer … Read more

Fabrik announced today a new family of sleek desktop hard drives that incorporates 2GB of free online storage through the company's MyFabrik Web service: SimpleDrive. The new drives (designed by Pininfarina, longtime designer of the Ferrari) come in several capacities, which are color-coded: 160GB (red); 250GB (white); 320GB (blue); 500GB (black); 750GB (charcoal); and 1TB (charcoal). All feature a single, 3.5-inch hard drive from Hitachi, including the 1TB version. This is the first single-disk, 1TB external hard drive on the market.

Initially, all versions will ship with USB 2.0 interfaces, but in May, Fabrik plans to ship … Read more

Most computer peripherals are already available in tons of wacky incarnations: speakers, mice, keyboards, and of course USB storage drives. But memory card readers have, at least until this point, remained pretty boring. Cue Brando's USB Piggy Card Reader, which really does look just like a piggy bank. It can handle, according to ProductDose, SD, CF, XD, MS, Mini SD, and T-flash/Micro SD cards. And it connects to your computer via a USB 2.0 "tail." Sure, it might be taking the definition of "memory hog" (oink, oink) a little too literally, but it'… Read more

Yesterday Yahoo announced they would begin offering Yahoo Mail users unlimited storage. The company will start with U.S. accounts and continue to roll out the upgrade to most of the world by the end of June. The only other major company to offer unlimited Web e-mail storage is AOL, starting in 2005 for paid members.

Despite the big upgrade, something that bugs me is that attachment sizes are still limited to 10MB for free accounts. Both MSN and Yahoo have premium e-mail services that double the mostly standard 10MB attachment size (at a price). This can be really handy … Read more

TiVo may be a life-changer, but there's a dark side for couch potatoes who are also pack rats: the dreaded full hard drive. If you're too cheap to get a new version (that would be us), you're stuck with a disc that seems perennially full: As we all know, the maximum storage capacity is always based on low-resolution recordings, which make Lost reruns look like moving impressionist paintings.

But if you do have a newer Series 3 box--or any other DVR with an eSATA port--there may be help for those who can't just can't bring … Read more

Steekr is a new online storage service with automated backup software for both Windows and Mac. Users get a gigabyte to store whatever they want. Steekr is a sibling product to SteekUp, parent company Agematis' business-centric backup service that gives customers 100GB with a paid subscription. The new service is designed for casual users who want to automate file backups or move large files between locations without optical media.

The software installation is needed only for people who want to automate file backups. If you want to stick to the Web, you can still back up anything you want with … Read more

Everybody's got junk and often not enough room to stow it. When Public Storage is a little out of your price range, there's Store At My House, a new service that matches people who need to store stuff with those who have space for it. You can register to rent out your attic, an extra room, or even a parking space. Entries are displayed on a Google map, and you can sort through listings on a sidebar for whatever type of space is needed. If it's not there, there's a request form for others browse and … Read more