SkyDrive (from Microsoft at https://skydrive.live.com/) has been offering 25GB of storage for files for years now. Recently, with a newer iteration of the service, they lowered the free storage offering to 7GB. As this Lifehacker article points out, if you act now, you can be “upgraded” back to having 25GB of storage free.
And as this other Lifehacker article points out, the max file size for SkyDrive is 2GB (10GB for Google Drive; unlimited with some qualification for Dropbox.)
Putting the two pieces of info together, it occurs to me that for the average student, you can use SkyDrive to backup most of your school files (if you have <25 GB of files and they are <2 GB each). This has the benefits of:
- having a backup copy of your files in addition to the ones on your hard drive,
- having an backup that is 'offsite,’
- having the files accessible anywhere (where you have Internet access,
- for some Microsoft Office files, you can actually edit them online, and
- for 25 GB with 2 GB file size, it would back up most file for an ‘average’ student.
About point #4, I tried open an Excel file that is 5.9MB in size using the office web app via my web browser – that failed. Also, the online Excel app does not support a lot of regular features in the desktop version.
For me personally, since I use Dropbox for most of my current schoolwork, my main motivation for using SkyDrive is for a tertiary (and offsite) backup for my older class files. (You should still have local a second backup of your files for good backup practice.) This works well especially if you don’t usually use your SkyDrive online – which I do not. Frequently use of the SkyDrive online via your browser is a potential risk because it increases the chance of you accidentally deleting things online. If you delete the files online, that deletion propagates to your local file! Unfortunately, unlike Dropbox, you cannot restore files you have deleted on SkyDrive.
Furthermore, to reduce the overhead of having yet another program running in the background, you can use the Task Scheduler to run the SkyDrive desktop syncing program, and have it stopped after a set amount of time – perhaps an hour (versus just having it run continuous in the background). I think the Windows Task Scheduler gives you the option to kill program that runs for a certain period. But if that does not work (task scheduler can be flaky sometimes), you can always scheduler a taskfill to kill the process (and thus the program) manually.
If you have no school files, this would be a nice location to backup your photo as well. Though I suspect it is far more likely for people to have more than 25GB of photo than 25GB of class files.
To reiterate, the major short coming of using SkyDrive for backup is the possibility of accidentally deleting your files online and have that deletion propagate back to your machine. Thus, you would want to have a local backup of the files as well. The benefit – an offsite backup of your files.