In the digital age, internet users have increasing amounts of data. More important is our increasing need for instant or portable access to this data. Professionals need to have multiple points of access and sharing capability for files (you don’t always remember to email things to yourself, be honest). Teens want to be able to carry entire discographies of the latest pop, rock, and hip hop tunes, and their parents wouldn’t mind having a place to keep and share all the family photos and videos they take. File management is a useful skill for pretty much anyone, and a basic knowledge of your options at different price points will help you decide what solution is best for you.
Let’s begin with the most basic – a portable USB hard drive. Shelling out a hundred bucks will get you a terabyte of data, but not much in terms of functionality. If you go with an external, and you want to bring those files with you, you’re toting them around everywhere you go. Smaller amounts of space will be able to fit into flash drives, but that’s still something you need to have the wherewithal to bring everywhere you’ll need it. Still, this is the cheapest option over the long run, and you’ll likely never run out of space.
If you’re a webmaster, you already have a hosting account, or a dedicated server. Let’s forget about the latter, and assume you pay 9.95 or something a month for the baby package over at HostGator. Well, if you pay a year in advance, that hundred bucks will pretty much pay for unlimited data on your shared server – for that year anyway. The advantages here are that you already have that hosting account for your website, and you can access the files you put up there anytime, from anywhere (that has a file transfer protocol client, downloadable for free) – except of course if your server is down, which it likely will be less than 1% of the time, but that small percentage can come at very inconvenient moments.
By far the most robust file management tools are part of what we so mystically call “the cloud.” A frontrunner in this service right now is Dropbox. Dropbox is my favorite of these options. for $100 a year, you get 50 GB of storage – a mere 1/20 of what you got for a one time payment towards that external hard drive. But with Dropbox, everything you upload is instantly shared to any devices you enable – so for one thing, you don’t wind up keeping as much in the cloud. For another thing, you can share different files with different people, keep modified copies of files, and easily (with little set up seamlessly) deliver files to various destinations. Here’s the intro to Dropbox video that will tell you more about how it works. Enjoy!