Yeah, all 12 of you. Speak up! Back during the first dot.com heyday a host of different companies all jumped on the ‘We’ll offer free online disk space!’ business model. Software pirates and music enthusiasts worldwide thanked them for assisting in their distribution efforts before these services went out of business. Now I find myself needing such a service.
We have this dilemma at Skidmore, which I also had at Bowdoin – namely how to enable file sharing between faculty at different institutions. Sad but true, mostly they’re too technically illiterate to use, say, IM transfers (and generally the firewall gets in the way anyway) and college’s have an inherent resistance to adding accounts to their own authentication systems (not without good reason – what happens is, they add these accounts, and everyone forgets about them, and suddenly you wake up one day and find you have 55k accounts in your ldap directory and only ~6k that you can readily identify). Never-mind that these issues could be resolved by simply applying good management practices. Sounds great in theory, in practice it just doesn’t happen. At Bowdoin they punted and licensed ftp space from an outside vendor. I’m looking for alternative solutions and am all ears. Basically I’m hoping for a free file storage service similar to the once free xdrive. Any suggestions? Pipe up in the comments. Oh and the ‘use gmail as online storage’ won’t fly since it doesn’t really enable sharing and also see my earlier comment about lack of technical acumen on the part of the folks who will be using this. It needs to be drop dead simple.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 
Ok, I am going to the archives on this one so it will take a while to chip the rust off. I used to have sales reps use an online free drivespace deal for retrieving doc’s. I cannot remember the name of it but may in time.
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Try this out for starters
http://www.freewebspace.net/guide/diskstorage.shtml
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I haven’t tried it, but someone sent me this link when I was looking to host some files:
http://www.ourmedia.org/
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What about a .mac account? Can everyone use a public folder?
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Anyone seen Dave? Paging Dave. Need some new reading material here please.
BF2 tonight?
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Hey,
Sorry, I’m back. Soooo busy at work, no time for anything but eating and sleeping and some World of Warcraft on the weekends. Anyway, posts coming soon.
as to the storage stuff I asked about here, I actually had to tell the instructor ‘I have to play triage, your request will have to wait, sorry! but the quick and easy answer was also – go get a yahoo account and use their briefcase, which for all I know is what she did. I think Andrew suggested this to me but I can’t recall offhand.
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