Ever-increasing free online storage

Once upon a time (about 3 years ago), when I was using windows, I had a laptop (the one I broke) with only 10GB of hard disk. It was a Fujitsu S-5582 which later I upgraded to 20GB, wow! I had a 60GB external laptop drive (which I also broke shortly after I bought the laptop), so that leaves me with a big storage dilemma – speaking of irony.

It was running on XP and Puppy Linux (live, i.e. run from CD and not installed locally) and understandably the hard disk was almost full before I started using it. So what did I do with my files and extra applications I need to use?

A. Don’t keep any files in the hard disk.

B. Put it somewhere else that I can access easily.

C. Forget about installing any applications, even office.

Answer:  all of the above.

After much thoughts in the shower and on the toilet bowl, I’ve decided to use my ever-increasing gmail mailbox, as a storage. Someone told me about gmail drive, a very small application for windows that enables one to drag and drop files into a gmail account. It will magically save each file as an email attachment in gmail. It worked marvellously. The only limitation is the file size is limited to 10MB (now 20MB) each, as per gmail’s attachment limit.

As for office apps, I used Google documents, ebuddy or meebo for messaging and other hosted apps – anything to avoid installing on my hard disk. Being poor made me analyse really hard for solutions

What about Mac?

Since I broke that laptop and changed to Mac, gmail drive is no longer usable. Although now I have a 250GB hard disk, it will still be nice to back up important stuff. There is a Mac equivalent called gDisk but it was very buggy when I tried to use it. After much googling, I found a firefox extension called Gspace, which works on windows, mac and linux. Yay!

How to Work It

1. Download the Mac OSX version

2. Install the .xpi file with firefox

3. Launch firefox and go to menu Tools -> Gspace. Gspace will be launched within firefox. The interface looks like an ftp client. You don’t have to care about what ftp clients are if you don’t don’t what it means

4. Add account - Click on “Manage Accounts”. Fill in your gmail account and password. You can add more than one gmail account. Check “remember password” if you don’t want to be prompted to enter  your password on every launch.

5. Login - from the drop down menu next to “manage accounts” button, select the gmail account you’d like to login and click “login”.

6. Transfer –  in the left pane, browse to the specific file(s) on your computer you’d like to upload to your gmail account. The file limit is the same with gmail attachment size, which is 20MB at the moment. Then click the right arrow button in the middle and walla! You can also download from gmail by clicking the left arrow button in the middle but using the same method.

In Gmail

Every file uploaded will be automatically converted to an email attachment in gmail. If you’d like to access your files from any computer with a browser, just sign in to gmail as you normally would. The files would be in emails with subject starting with “GSPACE”.