As the Internet has expanded and it has become cheaper to host files on the Internet, more and more people have been using online file storage. What an online file storage provider allows is for an individual or a company to take important files on their computer–be they text, image, video or music–and transfer them to the Internet. This results in two benefits. The first is that the files can be pulled from the Internet on any computer. The second is that, if something were to happen to the computer, the files would still be safe because they are kept on the web rather than on the individual computer.

How Does Online File Storage Work?

There are two ways that online file storage works. The first is through web access. Typically what happens here is that you go to their website and then login using an account username you’ve created already. Once in, you’ll see a list of the files that you have uploaded to the server. You can download the files or upload other files. On top of that, most of these file storage services allow you to organize the files into folders on the actual server rather than having to do it on your computer and then upload from there.

The other way that online file storage works is through FTP access. Unlike the web access that gives you access to a web portal to manage your files, here you just organize the files through a FTP manager such as FileZilla. By logging into the FTP, you’ll gain access to the server where you can move files around, download them and upload other ones. This is a more basic form of file management, but gives nearly all the same capabilities that web access would without needing to access the web portal.

Benefit of an Online File Storage Provider

The reason most people use an online file storage provider is because of extra security. Hardware is known to fail after a while. By using online file storage, an individual can ensure that they don’t lose their files just because the hardware–whether that is the hard drive or the computer–fails. With this in mind, it is advantageous to sign up for file storage so that important files are not corrupted or loss just because of a hardware problem on your PC. Since they do daily backups of their servers, your files are secure consistently.