InformationWeek

Remote access can be outsourced to an Internet company that provides online storage. Anyone with a PC or personal digital assistant and a modem can access the Internet from almost anywhere and use those stored files. Such a remote storage system needs to be exceptionally easy to use, cheap (or free), and secure. The service also must have customer support available. I reviewed two of these services, from X:drive Inc. and Driveway Corp., to see whether they meet these three requirements.

Both X:drive and Driveway meet the price requirement because they give away 25 Mbytes of storage free; more storage is available for a fee, or for free if you refer customers to the service. Yes, 25 Mbytes seems small when standard hard drives come in gigabytes. However, if it's used only for personal data files and not applications, you can store a lot of Word, Excel, and other files in that space.

Registering for X:drive (http://www.xdrive.com) was painless, although I was put off by its required "date of birth" and "gender" fields. However, since users get free storage, you'd expect the company would want to gather demographic information as a possible source of revenue through ad sales.

Once registered, you're taken to a "My X:drive" screen, which is laid out clearly and resembles Windows and Windows NT Explorer with folders and subfolders. A private and public folder are automatically created, and a gauge shows how much of your 25 Mbytes is left. I was able to easily create new folders below the public and private ones.

X:drive provides a client program you can download; I did, and it installed smoothly. The client is really slick--it connects seamlessly to the Internet, signs you on to X:drive, and brings up Explorer showing an x: drive network drive icon on your computer. To remove the x: drive from Explorer, simply right-click and disconnect, as with any network drive.

I was able to upload as many as five files at once from the Web, or an entire folder if I used the client program. Uploading a file or files while on the Web was quick and easy because I could browse to the desired file. I'm a bit worried about this feature, however, because it might allow X:drive to view the contents of your PC's hard drive while you're connected.

When using the client, you have all the features of Explorer--drag and drop, rename, delete, etc.--working the same way they would if they were on a drive attached to a PC. I could create a new folder on the x: drive, and move a file from the public test folder I created to that folder.

To share files, you have to go to the X:drive Web site. The client doesn't yet allow you to set up files for sharing, although the company is working on this feature. Shared files go in your public folder or into a subfolder you set up under that folder.

Sharing works only with files, not a folder, so if you have a lot of files you want to share, it will take a long time to set up. The complexity of setting up sharing includes the fact that you can list only six E-mail addresses at one time. You can, of course, use a group E-mail address to get around this. Files are available for sharing for only seven days. This is definitely a problem if you want to collaborate through the life of a project.

Registering for Driveway (http://www.driveway.com) also begins easily, although it, too, has date-of-birth and gender fields. Amusingly, your lost password key can be the "location of your first kiss," in addition to standards such as your mother's maiden name.

At this point, the process becomes confusing because of references to Web folders, especially because Driveway creates a number of folders automatically, labeled backups, documents, and pictures. It turns out that the Web folders mentioned are a feature of Office 2000 applications--Office 2000 provides a client similar to that of X:drive. This is definitely not as simple as X:drive, and may be dependent on Internet Explorer 5.

The folders screen was similar to X:drive's, although not as cleanly laid out, and includes a gauge indicating how much space is being used. I could create subfolders, but since Driveway's folders didn't highlight the way X:drive's did, it was hard to tell where I was and whether I was really creating a subfolder, although a "path" is provided above the folders. Driveway is creating a new interface that looks easier to understand, but it's a bit busy.

Uploading a file was easy because Driveway uses the same browse routine as X:drive. As many as seven files can be uploaded at one time.

Driveway's sharing feature is better than X:drive's. It lets you share an entire folder and protect it with a password if you want. There is no time limit on sharing. The one drawback to true collaboration--and it's a major one--is that people can view the files but they can't change them, nor can they upload files to the shared folder.

Security on both X:drive and Driveway is no better or worse than that on any Internet site. There's no indication that either service encrypts files during upload or download, for example.