Get 50GB of free cloud storage from MediaFire
It's not quite Dropbox, but it's still a whole lot of space for a zero-dollar investment.
You know the old saying: you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much cloud storage.
Well, that's the saying in my house. No one in my family understands it, but that doesn't stop me from repeating it every day at breakfast.
There are plenty of services that will give you a few free acres in the cloud, like Dropbox (2GB), SugarSync (5GB), and SkyDrive (7GB). But if you have a lot of stuff you want to store and/or share, check out MediaFire: it's offering a whopping 50GB of free cloud storage.
That's obviously an order of magnitude more than you get elsewhere, so there has to be a catch, right? Right.
For starters, MediaFire doesn't do file or folder syncing like Dropbox and its ilk. You can upload stuff via its Web interface, or install the MediaFire Express desktop utility (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). But both of these options merely enable drag-and-drop uploading, not syncing.
The other limitation: free accounts are limited to a maximum individual file size of 200MB. Of course, save for video, not many individual files come anywhere near that size, so that shouldn't be a problem -- unless you want to upload video.
I should also note that for anyone thinking of using MediaFire for backups, there's no way to batch-download your archived files -- unless you upgrade to a Pro account (which costs $9 monthly and includes a wealth of other extra features).
So, with limitations like those, what good is this service? I'd say it's good for sharing large files with others, accessing your data from other PCs, collaborating on documents, and creating backups of non-critical files.
In other words, it's 50GB of free storage, no strings attached. It might not be ideal for everything, but I'm sure you'll find it useful for some things.
Have you found another service that ponies up this much free space? Tell me about it in the comments!