Microsoft's Metro-ified vision of the future relies heavily on users being able to access files and user settings no matter what Windows 8 device they're logged into. The SkyDrive cloud service will (obviously) be a large part of that cohesion. Gearing up for that, the SkyDrive team announced a handful of new features for the service. It's not the unlimited storage space for docs and photos that has long been rumored, but the changes are good ones nonetheless.
After a brief hiatus, Google Drive rumors made a comeback last month when the venerable Wall Street Journal reported that the long-fabled service was finally on the verge of release. Many weeks have passed and there’s still no sign of the Dropbox-like cloud storage service. What we have instead is yet another tantalizing rumor.
While PC geeks may be eagerly awaiting the launch of Ivy Bridge and Kepler GPUs, less hardcore tech fans have been throwing dollars at two particular niches: mobile and the cloud. Box, a cloud storage company competing for your nebulous attention, has just announced a killer new offer that brings those two elements together. The service released a spiffy update for its Android app today, and anyone who snags the app in the next 30 days gets a whopping 50GB of free cloud storage space, good for the rest of your life.
With 25GB of absolutely no strings attached free storage, SkyDrive has always been an amazing value. Of course that’s not to say its best in class, far from it actually for one key reason; it’s painfully difficult to access. Logging into the SkyDrive site using Windows Live is easy enough, but having to add files one at a time is painfully in-efficient. If you modify a photo for example, you need to download it fully, make your changes, upload the new version, and then manually delete the old one. Office Web Apps integration and batch file adding have helped, but it is still no substitute for Dropbox. If the rumors are correct though, this could all be changing soon. 
Google's sticking its proverbial fingers into a whole lot of proverbial pies right now: search, social media, advertising, smartphones, restaurant reviews, self-driving cars and a ton more. A rumor swirling around the 'Net says the company's about to offer all those, +1 more: a cloud storage service similar to Dropbox. Yes, the long whispered-about GDrive service has reared its elusive head again -- but now it's just called Drive.
Dropbox has a lot of things going for it, but if you use the cloud storage service with any regularity, there's a good chance you'll bang up against the 2GB offered in the free version fairly quickly. (Assuming that you don't Gmail account chain trick outlined in our Dropbox Cheat Sheet, that is.) If you're chafing at your no-cost bonds, the service is giving you an opportunity to add up to another 5GB of space absolutely free -- if you're willing to be a guinea pig, that is.
All the fire and brimstone rhetoric following the MegaUpload shutdown makes it seem like there was no legitimate use for the site. Despite that image, thousands of users were using MegaUpload to store and share their own files, which have now been lost. In response, Pirate Parties in several countries are putting together a list of affected users in preparation for a lawsuit against the FBI. 
Microsoft always seemed a little embarrassed by SkyDrive, its online file storage and sharing tool. It was shoved off in the corner, not integrated with other products where it might be useful. Then today Redmond dropped a huge HTML5-centric update on us that makes SkyDrive more than usable. It’s actually kind of good.
Last week we discussed Google’s lack of support for music lovers in 
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