Free Online Storage For Your Media Files

I’ve been trying out two pieces of software called Snagit and Camtasia Studio, from TechSmith. Both allow you to do “screen captures”. Snagit takes a single snapshot of your computer screen. Camtasia Studio produces “screencap” videos, so you can produce a variety of tutorials and multimedia courses by running other software and narrating your steps.

So far, I like them both. While US$299 is a lot for Camtasia, you could foreseeably produce some valuable tutorials during the 30-day free trial and sell them on your website, thereby coming up with the funds for purchase. On the other hand, you could recoup your costs with just a few sales. But if you plan to give away your videos and don’t have the budget, you could try the OpenSource Camstudio.  It doesn’t have as many features, but it’s only in version 2.00.

If you plan to do screencap videos, you need either Camtasia, Camstudio, or some other reasonable replica (unless you can write your own software). Regardless of which software you decide to use, there’s a bigger problem: space and bandwidth.

I ran a few screencap videos and ended up with several of them being 60-90 Mb (Megabytes) each, in high-quality format, at a size of 640 wide x480 high pixels. Sure, I could shrink the video size, or quality, but the result is nearly unwatchable.

I also purchased an inexpensive (about Cdn$24.95 +taxes) “flex” videocam from NexxtTech to create some how-to-build-it tutorials for one of my craft weblogs. While none of the videos ran over 6 minutes, the files were pushing 120 Mb each. Any lower quality would be pointless, as viewers need to be able to see the fine details of the craftwork.

Only problem is, offering any or all of these videos for free would likely destroy my monthly website hosting budget. All it would take is just a few people watching the videos - and some may watch online a few times instead of downloading them. My monthly website bandwidth limits could potentially be exceeded in a few days, or even in half-a-day, once people started finding the phrase “free how-to video” in the search engines.

Fortunately, Orbitfiles is offering 1000 Mb (1 Gb) free space online. How can they possibly do this, and for how long? Is disk space that cheap now? What kind of upload or download time could they possibly offer if they are using gigantic drives in bulk?

Unfortunately, I have no idea what their architecture is, but regardless, how do you beat a free gigabyte of storage? Sure, you probably have to agree that your content becomes public domain (or at least uses a Creative Commons license), but that’s not so bad. Wouldn’t you rather decide that yourself than have someone steal your content and offer it free elsewhere? It’s easier to be generous yourself, upfront, than get upset later.

Now, I could easily exceed that free 1000 Mb with just 8-12 of my tutorial videos. So if 1000 Mb isn’t enough for you either, Orbitfiles also offers a Zeus plan with 5000 Mb (5 Gb) of space for $4.99/m (presumably in US dollars). Compare this with $9.95/m for the same space at iBackup. However, iBackup does give you a 15-day free trial with that 5 Gb. Do a bit of bootstrapping, and you could offer a few videos for free at no cost to you.

Not bad, considering what you’d be shelling out for monthly bandwidth if your videos were on your own website and they suddenly became immensely popular. If you aren’t earning money for your website in some way, then an inexpensive storage service is crucial. These solutions reduce the cost of podcasting or vodcasting/ vlogging, or simply storing any type of files online.

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