We’ve been talking a lot about data storage and the importance of having a comprehensive solution to protect your digital content (look at our Featured Article section for links to the excellent series by Phil Hagen). In the last article of the series, we focused on remote storage. Some of the mentioned options were Jungle Disk (Etilities Forum), Carbonite, iDrive and Dropbox.

Today we’re going to focus on another alternative, Box.Net (Etilities Forum). Box stores your data in the cloud and makes it accessible from anywhere. It advertises network security (256 bit SSL encryption), data security and a privacy policy. In addition to the core service, Box also comes with additional features such as file sharing and collaboration, version history, and the ability to use third party services such as Zoho to edit your files directly in the browser. Since it offers an open platform for developers to use, the list of its available services is bound to grow.

The pricing and space ranges from 1GB for free to 15GB for $19.95. There is also an offering for enterprises at $15 per user with additional customization options. You can look at this page for more information on the various plans. To make it easier to access your data from anywhere, Box has a mobile specific page at m.box.net and now also offers a free native iPhone application, a huge selling point for me.

Although there were a few turn-offs about this service such as the file-size limits (25MB to 1GB depending on your plan), Box offers a simple and easy solution to your remote storage needs.

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