Well, I didn't know what to call this. With iCloud out there and many of us converted over, we are seeing those things that are missing in iCloud. Like keychain sync and some others.
Recently I needed a cheap laptop to go with me on some road trips to do those things that the iPad is not so good at, but I don't need it very often and I don't need to do many things. So I bought a cheap Acer Aspire 15.6" laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium.
One of the things that came with it was Windows Live Essentials which is a bunch of apps and tools, some on the computer, some on the web. I thought what the heck, it's raining so no golf and I'm bored. So I cranked them up.
First thing was to get a Windows Live Mail account, you do this during the setup of WLE (windows live essentials), you can use either live.com or hotmail.com to do this. I chose a live.com address ( lloydp21@live.com ). Then I got to fiddling around and doing some research.
Here's what I found that is all cross platform and all free :
1. Windows Skydrive - free 25Gbyte storage, online versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. (note that these apps work just fine with Safari and OSX, they are limited online versions). Also you can store documents, the only limit being no single file bigger than 100Mb.
2. Windows Mesh Drive - free 5Gbyte synced storage. This is darned slick!! The syncing works between windows and the online Mesh drive and/or another computer, including a Mac!! If you just sync the data between your PC and Mac, then there is no storage limit I believe.
I have made a directory that only has the files I would want to share between my Mac and my laptop. In it is a couple documents and copies of my keychain data. So now I have that synced too. Downside is that I have to periodically make a new copy of that data.
BTW, the apps in the Skydrive are also useable from Safari on an iPad. Not wonderful to use from there, but it does work and as well as iWork iPad apps do.
In my looking around, I found a bunch of free cloud storage.
Here's a link to an iPad app for managing files on a few free cloud sites :
http://smestorage.com/?p=static&page=iphone
Lloyd
