In just a handful of decades, technology has come a long way in terms of computing storage. There were the punch cards in the 1960s, cassette tapes in the 1970s, floppy disks in the 1980s, CD-R and RW discs in the 1990s, and the 2000s saw the advent of thumb drives and SD cards.
A number of these storage options are available for you right here on campus. Storage devices for sale at the library include jump drives, CD-R & RW, and DVD-R. In addition, Geneseo provides 50MB of file space to students. Most of the computers on campus have a direct link to file space on their desktops. The Geneseo wiki has instructions on how to access your file space from off campus.
Your ipod can also be used just like a thumb drive, provided you haven’t packed it to it’s limit with music… And don’t forget that you can store your files in the “cloud.” For instance, Geneseo provides all students with a Google Apps account. Using this account, you can upload up to 1 GB of word, pdf, and power point, and excel files to your google docs account. Once you do so, you can access them from any computer with internet access.
There are a number of other online storage services for which you can take advantage, most of which offer 1 or 2 GB of free storage. Dropbox is an online storage service that allows you to store/share up to 2GB of files. You have to install a small program on your computer to run it, but it allows you to upload any type of file as long as it is under 350MB. Similar services include ElephantDrive (2GB free), FilesAnywhere (1 GB free), and FlipDrive (1 GB free) to name a few. (LiveMesh is a similar service that allows you to store up to 5GB for free, but only works for PC users running Vista or Windows 7).
For storing photos and videos, there are a number of options available. Google’s Picasa Web Album is accessible through your Geneseo Google Apps account. Picasa allows you to store (and share if you wish) up to 1 GB of video and photo files. An alternative to Picasa is Flickr, which allows you to upload up to 300 MB of photos and 2 videos per month.
Do you have a favorite storage/sharing service not mentioned above? Leave a comment below and let us know about it!
