Got my Free Xdrive -- Woohoo!

I've been curious about Xdrive ever since I was told they are developing an API. The last I heard, the Xdrive API will be released in the spring -- which is getting close! With that in mind, I decided to try out Xdrive by signing up for the free service.

Xdrive Shines in "Storage Wars"

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled "The Online Storage Wars" (possibly available only to subscribers), which showed Xdrive to be the best value among the online storage services that were covered in the article (these included Xdrive.com, Mozy.com, Omnidrive.com, and Box.net). Xdrive gives you the largest amount of drive space for free (5 GBytes).

AIM Screen Name Integration

One of the nice features about Xdrive for people who use AIM is that you open your account using an AIM screen name. We're seeing AOL apply this strategy increasingly, making AIM screen names into a kind of "single sign-on" implementation for many different services, from Xdrive to AIM Pages to OpenID.

So, getting started with Xdrive was quite easy:

The next page asks you to enter your name and tells you that by clicking the "Submit" button you acknowledge that you have read and consent to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The next thing I saw was:

That's about as easy a sign up process as anyone could ask for.

Using Xdrive

I clicked the "Click To Launch Xdrive" with great curiosity (since I was working on my Gentoo Linux machine). A new browser window popped up:

Gentoo Linux doesn't matter, at least at this point, because the user interface is browser based.

Clicking the "Upload" button opened an upload browser window that informed me that two types of upload are available (Basic and Accelerator Plus). The Accelerator Plus upload is a Java application. In my case, I was going to have to install the Java Runtime Environment onto my Gentoo box before I could try out Accelerator Plus (not a problem, since I'd been meaning to do that for a while anyway).

I clicked "Add" to add some files for uploading, used a standard browse form to select some files.

What wasn't clear to me immediately was how to upload an entire directory. If I had to select individual files one by one, the utility of online storage would be considerably compromised. The "Upload Help" link held the key: folders can only be uploaded using Accelerator Plus.

Fortunately, by this time my Gentoo "emerge" of the Java Runtime Environment was complete. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my Firefox to recognize that the JRE was installed. I'll have to work on that problem another day...

Over on my Windows machine, running with Accelerator Plus worked fine. I selected a 22 MByte directory and uploaded it with no problem. Hmm...

Once it was uploaded, I was able to see my uploaded AOL directory in my Xdrive browser on my Gentoo machine. Yeah!

Web Grab (Beta)

Just for fun I hovered over the "Beta" button on my Xdrive home page and selected "Web Grab", which promises to "Create an archive of your blog postings, profile pages and more." Now, that sounds cool! A browser window popped up asking for a Web address:

I clicked the "Start Upload" button and was soon shown:

Conclusion

Xdrive is cool! I can't wait to see the new JSON API when that comes out in the next couple months.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media