CloudPT Offers 16GB of free Cloud Storage for Everyone

If you're constantly worrying about sparingly manage your Dropbox account, due to its tight size limits (for free accounts), you'll like to know that there's a new portuguese Cloud service coming up today, that will offer each and every user 16GB of free cloud space. Its name is CloudPT from Portugal Telecom.

It's a "no string attached" service: they won't be charging you after a "promotional period"; you don't have to use or subscribe any of their other services; you don't even need to create an email account in their service. All you have to do is sign up using your regular email, and... think about how you'll put your free 16GB of cloud space into good use. (As usual, you also get free iOS/Android Apps).

There's only one slight catch... is that the service is "invite only", with users having 3 invites to spread around between their friends. (A clever way to prevent it from having millions of users trying to create accounts simultaneously - and at the same time heating up the "desire" to have one of those invites. :)

So... looks like its time to call your portuguese friends and ask them nicely for an invite. ;)
(I'm already out of invites, but we're setting up a shared doc where people can ask for one, and then "repay the favor" by giving one of their own invites to someone else on the list - if you're interested let me know on the comments).

One final touch that some users will certainly love a lot, is that you can setup your own custom domain for a shared folder in CloudPT - meaning you can use it to host files and content on the web. If your hosting server has limited bandwidth, you could put all your photos, music, videos - for instance - on CloudPT, and serve them directly.

Low Cost Petabyte Storage

In a time where I - myself - am still looking for a reliable, simple, and cheap way to keep my data safe (my main computer crashed a few days ago, and I'm still painstakingly slowly recovering data from it) this blog post jumped to my attention: talking about BackBlaze solutions to its large-scale storage needs.

To start with, lets analyze how much a petabytes costs these days (if you don't know what a petabyte is, its 1000 Terabytes, and 1TB equals 1 Gigabyte; to put it in perspective, 1PB equals about 227 thousand DVD-R discs.)

As you can see, the cost difference between the raw hard drives and what most companies charge you is substantial - which is why BackBlaze decided to build their own storage solution (just like Google does) and now shares their secrets with all of us.

The solution they come up with is their BackBlaze PODs, each holding 67TB and costing just $7,687.

The access to all this data is done - not via iSCSI, NFS, SQL, or Fibre Channel - but *exclusively* via HTTPS.

For all the details and a complete hardware and price list for these pods be sure to read the full post on how to build a petabyte storage solution at low cost.



I wouldn't need that many space for myself... but I'm glad they decided to share it with us so we can use some of their ideas. :)

Get Dropbox Now

Remember Dropbox?

They just had their live presentation in the Techcrunch 50, a conference that is looking for the best ideas and startups around the web.

Unfortunately for them their presentation didn't go all that well - they had some Wi-Fi troubles that messed his concentration, and things got a little "out-of-control." And when you're competing with other great concepts and ideas, this is a killer. :(

I still can't understand why he failed to mention the revision control, which gives you access to any version of any file you modify in your dropbox! That's probably the feature with the most "wow" factor. It's a shame it went unnoticed.
(They should have played their demo video instead...)

Well, here's the new stuff:
Dropbox is now live and available for everyone! No need to hunt down invites from friends! Just go there and sign up for your free account.

Linux support is also up and running!

And if you feel 2Gb is not enough, you can now get up to 50Gb for $10/month or $100/year.

For the first 500 users that went to http://www.getdropbox.com/beta/tc50 were entitled to a free premium account - which were used up in about 1 minute. :)

Don't forget to check the demo video if you haven't done so before:

Dropbox - Online Virtual Disk

If you can't wait any longer for the official Google Drive then you should really check out: Dropbox.

It's an online virtual disk drive that keeps your files in sync wherever you may go, and allows easy sharing of files and folders with your colleagues and friends.

It's extremely easy to setup and use, and from what I've seen - I think every other similar services should be worried about it.

Check the demo video and sign up at the site.



[Dropbox]