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Xdrive is back

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman

AOL acquired the online storage company, Xdrive, a little more than a year ago. Since then, the Xdrive service has suffered from some decay. I tried using it a few months ago and found the software buggy and the Web site too slow too use. In the space Xdrive left in the market, other online storage and backup companies sprouted -- many offering for free what Xdrive once charged for.

But now Xdrive is back, with not only updated software (both for your PC and on the Xdrive site) but with a new pricing plan: Free. You can get 5GB of Xdrive space for nothing. 50GB will cost you $100 a year. Either way, you get a virtual hard drive on your PC (extremely handy), access to files on your account from any Web-connected computer, and a backup application. You can also flag files for sharing, which makes Xdrive a competitor to file transfer products like AllPeers and YouSendIt.

The team at Download.com checked out the new Xdrive and gave it five stars. Xdrive has burned me in the past, but I've always liked the service's (theoretical) integration between the PC-based application and the online service. It looks like it's worth a try again.