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Your hard disk on the Web

The huge space that Google gives users of its email service can be harnessed to carve out a storage facility in cyberspace

You are away from your home or office desktop personal computer, and urgently need to access a file - it could be a text document, a piece of music, a video clipping or a PowerPoint presentation that you need to make at short notice. What do you do?

You telephone somebody at home or try to contact a colleague in office.

Then you part with your precious password so that he can open the folders on your PC, locate the file, and mail it to you. If it's not too bulky, you may even get it though how long the whole operation will get is anybody's guess.

Now thanks to Google (but entirely without their active participation) there is a way to put your "most wanted" files into your own private virtual hard disk on the Web, so that you can access it from anywhere in the world, where you can locate a Web browser. Users of Google's GMail service for e-mail receive an awesome 2.6 gigabytes of storage, which Google proudly announces with the message that you never need to delete an e-mail message. Most of us can't use that much space even after years of e-mailing and some clever geeks asked themselves, "Why waste so much lovely disk space?" So, they created a sneaky utility to use one's GMail account as a virtual file storage system on the Web.

If you don't have a GMail account, now is the time tie to sign up for one. The easiest way these days is to request the download of Google's desktop search. Having opened your GMail account, you then go to the website www.softpedia.com, which is a collection of free software downloads. Scroll through the opening page till you find a download button called GMail Drive and activate the download. The link offers multiple websites from which to access the freeware. Choose the nearest. The download size is just 133 kilobytes and even on a slow telephone dialup connection, it takes less than half a minute. Once you have installed the new drive, it will create an additional virtual drive, which you can check in the My Computer folder as a new drive called GMail drive. Double click on this drive, and it will ask you to login to your GMail account. Once you have successfully logged on, you can drag and drop any file on your hard disk into the GMail drive folder. When you go to your Gmail account, you will find that the file you have dragged appears as a self-addressed mail in your inbox.

There are a few limitations though. The maximum file size you can save on your GMail drive is 10 megabytes, and the file name has to be less than 40 characters. The software works with Internet Explorer, Netscape and Opera, as well as open source browsers such as Mozilla and Firefox. For the technically inclined, your GMail drive is what is known as a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual file-system around your GMail account. The latest version of the GMail Drive is 1.0.9.

Accessibility

Since you can access your GMail account from any browser anywhere, it follows that the files stored on your Gmail drive can also be accessed similarly by scrolling through your inbox. As you enjoy your own hard drive in cyberia, spare a silent thank you for the guy who created this utility, Bjarke Viksoe of Denmark. You might even send him a mail at bjarke@viksoe.dk

A. VISHNU

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