Store and Edit Documents Online With ADrive

I’ve had computers crash, I’ve lost thumb drives, I’ve (literally) thrown a hard drive down five stories thinking it wouldn’t break. It did, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why I thought it was a good idea to do that. Moral of the story is, I’m not to be trusted with keeping data from getting erased.

Thankfully, not even I can break the Internet. I’ve started using a number of different cloud-storage options to keep my files safe, available from everywhere, and easily accessible for myself and others. I’ve used, and liked, Dropbox, as well as a few others.

My personal favorite, though, has got to be ADrive, a service I only just recently found out about. Its first huge draw, if nothing else, is the massive amount of storage it offers – 50GB is nothing to sneeze at. There are paid versions that offer even more, up to 1TB, but I can’t imagine ever needing more than 50GB to keep my critical documents backed up.

Once you sign up for a free account, you’ll want to start uploading files. You can do it by a simple pop-up window, or through the nifty (but buggy) Java interface. If you’re a power uploader, you’ll want the desktop version – unfortunately, that’s only available in the paid versions. Uploading is easy, though, and is definitely worth the few minutes it takes.

Once files are uploaded to ADrive, they’re easy to play around with. You can organize your documents easily, moving them around in folders on ADrive. There’s a super-simple search function in ADrive that lets you find your files even faster. Everything can be moved by dragging and dropping, and there’s a running tally kept of how much of your space you’re currently using.

It’s also easy to share a file or a folder, making ADrive its own solution for sharing big files (again, 50GB is a pretty high ceiling). Downloading files is as simple as uploading them, even letting you mass-download in the same way you mass-upload. Pound for pound (or, I guess, GB for GB), ADrive is definitely one of the easiest file storage applications out there.

My favorite feature, though, is that you can edit your files online, and save them right back into ADrive. ADrive works with the Zoho suite of tools (which is like Google Docs, but with even more features), letting you open a file in Zoho. You can edit it in a pop-up window that opens (it appears creating an account with ADrive also gets you one with Zoho), and when you save it, it goes right back into ADrive.

That means, essentially, your Zoho account just became enormous. All your documents can be edited online, making it a hard drive and a Microsoft Office tool all in one – seriously useful if you’re not always sitting at the same computer, or even if you just don’t want to pay for Office.

The paid versions are great, and are even more useful if you’re looking for FTP support or a desktop application for uploading. The free version more than holds its own, though, and is perfect protection against the inevitable dying of hard drives that always seems to occur at the worst possible moments.

What’s your online storage application of choice?

Photo: Stuart Bryant

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