Google and Microsoft increase online storage

Google and Microsoft have followed last week's move by Apple and updated their online storage offerings, adding more capacity or new features to customers.

Google has increased the amount of storage it offers, but is charging for the privilege with the introduction of paid storage upgrades for its Picasa picture storage and Gmail email services. Users will have to pay at least $20 (£9.89) a year for an additional 6GB of online storage to supplement the 2.8GB that comes free with Gmail and the 1GB that comes with Picasa.

Ryan Aquino Google Software lead query-analysis engineer for Google Software said: "When you reach the limit of free storage, consider this your overflow solution." Other, new packages are available with more storage capacity up to 250GB for $500 (£247.12) a year.

On the same day, Microsoft re-branded its online storage offering, previously known as Windows Live Folders. The new Windows Live Skydrive product was made public as a beta preview and offers 500MB of online storage for any files, including pictures and email.

Windows Live Skydrive features an updated user interface and allows users to drag and drop files, as well as public directories. Microsoft described it as a personal hard drive on the internet in blogs at the time of its launch last Thursday.

The Google and Microsoft change comes days after Apple increased the online storage capacity for users of its .Mac service from 1GB to 10GB. Despite the fact the .Mac service is not free, Apple did not raise the price of its annual subscription charge, which remains at £69 per year.

In March, Yahoo announced unlimited storage for its web mail service. The only difference being that Yahoo flags accounts it suspects are being used for general online storage, rather than simply for emails.

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