The dramatic Megaupload crackdown has turned the online file sharing world upside down by shattering the illusion of invulnerability that many of these operators enjoyed. Earlier today, Uploaded.to shut out US users, while Filesonic pulled the plug globally. Since then, several more cyber lockers have followed suit.

Filesonic, which receives more than a billion page views every month, seems to be on the run. Not only is it restricting users from downloading files uploaded by others, there are also reports of large scale file deletion. The Twitter account of Filesonic, which is typically fairly chirpy, has also vanished off the face of the earth. Somewhat surprisingly, WUpload – which is Filesonic’s sister site, continues to function.

Fileserve, another popular file sharing service, has also capitulated. Going forward, you will only be able to download your own files from Fileserve. Other services operated by Fileserve – including Uploadstation, Filejungle, VideoBB and Videozer – also seem to be in shutdown mode. Affiliate program has been yanked, and user accounts and files are being deleted en masse. None of the files that I found through Google Search were downloadable.

Other services that Torrent Freak is reporting as down are Uploadbox, x7.to, and Filepost. 4shared has also terminated its affiliate program. However, unlike most of the other services, it has promised to pay out any dues within the next fifteen days.

Two industry stalwarts that have refused to budge are RapidShare and Mediafire. Both of them have decided to distance themselves from Megaupload, and are harping on the legitimacy of their business model. In fact, Mediafire even went a step further, and promised to shakeup the cloud storage industry with a major new release in the next quarter. I have included the responses from Rapidshare and Mediafire below.

Dear RapidShare fans,
You posted some comments on our wall today regarding the shutdown of Megaupload. There is no reason to be concerned. We distinguish ourselves from services like Megaupload in many major issues and we aren’t threatened in any way. One of the main differences between RapidShare and Megaupload is that we never wanted to escape from the legal access of any administration. RapidShare AG was founded in Switzerland, was always based at the address cited in the imprint and was always managed with an authentic name without any anonymous intermediary companies. The drastic measures against Megaupload were obviously seen as necessary by the FBI because the situation was different there.
We wish you a great time with RapidShare!

MediaFire’s premium services are based on a user’s ability to upload data and pay to distribute it. This storage and sharing model is similar to Akamai, Amazon S3, YouSendIt, etc. MediaFire has no caps or restrictions for downloading data and each upload is limited to a maximum size of 200MB for non-premium users.

Most importantly, people choose MediaFire because it offers high quality services that are simple to use and extremely powerful. We incorporate the latest HTML5 technologies, the most advanced user interfaces, and are constantly expanding our services with features requested by businesses and professionals. In Q2 2012, MediaFire will redefine how people access and manage their data and how they interact with the cloud by releasing long-in-development desktop and mobile applications that solve problems Microsoft, Dropbox, and Box fail to address.

A little more about MediaFire:

MediaFire was founded in 2006 and is based near Houston, Texas. MediaFire is used by people at 86% of Fortune 500 companies and is currently ranked in the top 100 websites globally by Amazon’s Alexa and Google/DoubleClick’s Ad Planner services.

Thanks again everyone, especially to our fans who we’ve heard loud and clear evangelizing the benefits of our service. It’s easy for us to get caught up in building our technology and services and we haven’t spent enough time espousing our own benefits and differentiators. The cloud is an incredibly convenient and powerful tool for many professionals, businesses and individuals. At MediaFire, we are committed to continuing to innovate on this technology and provide it to our users in new, simple, ethical and cost effective ways.

It looks like the Megaupload takedown is not just prompting rebuttal from sites like Uploaded.to, but also has put fear in the minds of other large File sharing websites.

After Uploaded.to blocked U.S. users, another large file sharing website called FileSonic has now stopped users from downloading files that other’s have uploaded.

When compared to Uploaded.to, FileSonic is a very large website with an Alexa global rank of 167 and a U.S. rank of 220. Compete data shows that FileSonic gets approximately 1.9 million visitors from the United States. The site now displays a message as shown below when you try to download a file from FileSonic.

All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.

If this file belongs to you, please login to download it directly from your file manager

It is not really clear as to whether FileSonic stopped file downloads due to fear of being targeted by the FBI and US Justice Department or whether they have already been targeted. However, it looks like that file sharing websites are starting to become cautious of what data they hold on their servers thanks to the U.S. Justice Department and FBI crackdown.

If you are affected by this, don’t forget to check out several alternatives to Megaupload to store files in the cloud and other ways to share files online. You can also check out services like Dropbox and SugarSync among others to easily sync and share your files online or take a look at several other services to backup and sync your files online.

This has been a very interesting last few days with the draconian piracy law of SOPA and PIPA being defeated in the U.S. Congress and Megaupload being shutdown by the U.S. Justice Department. In fact the Megaupload website was back online shortly on different servers as well.

In retaliation of the Megaupload shutdown, the famous group Anonymous also took down several websites in protest. However, it looks like the protest is now growing to another level.

According to reports from Torrent Freak, another file sharing website called Uploaded.to is now blocking users from U.S. and not allowing them to upload or download files from their service. This is definitely a big rebuttal from them and would likely make other services follow in their footsteps.

Currently, users who visit uploaded.to from United States are displayed a message similar to the one in the image above. It reads:

Not available

Our service is currently unavailable in your country. Sorry about that.

Uploaded.to has a traffic rank of 3075 in the United States according to Alexa and serves about 350K users from United States according to Compete. Though their stats are no where near what Megaupload had; which was the 13th most popular website in the world, it would definitely inconvenience U.S. users who have used it to store files on the website.

There is no official update from Uploaded.to about this blockage and whether it will remain permanent. In the meantime, if you have been affected by the Megaupload takedown or the Uploaded.to blockage, don’t forget to check out several alternatives to Megaupload to store files in the cloud and other ways to share files online.

The world lives on their mobile devices. In some countries users have 4-5 handhelds that they alternate to on a daily basis. The smartphone has spawned a trend. As the networks get bigger and the chips get faster, the user begins to rely of the smartphone for pretty much all it can task. The evolution of the wireless device has already progressed into the realm of handling the same workload a desktop PC could just a few short years ago. But with all this multi-tasking, all these apps, and all these videos and pictures, there comes one increasingly problematic issue.

Data Storage Space

For as amazing and functional as these little devices have become, they still obviously lack the plethora of external storage space found in most desktops. You may scoff at the idea of running out of storage space on a phone that has a SD card (which has the ability to be filled with a few gigs of data), but it can happen faster than you think these days. Some Android phones don’t have these cards either; such as the Nexus S which uses onboard USB storage.

So if you find yourself in need of more space on your Android, here are a few ways to make some room.

Ditch Unnecessary Apps

The phone comes with some apps already installed. For course you may download duds or just cease to use an app… or ten. So for all those forgotten and unused apps sitting on your phone, here’s how to delete them.

1. Go to Settings
2. Choose Applications
3. Pick Manage Applications
4. Find the Downloadedtab
5. Tap the application name you want to remove
6. Select the Uninstallbutton

This will probably be the easiest way to free up more storage space on your android phone.

Move Apps Into Storage

True, there are a number of Android apps that are stubborn (developers intentionally disabled the move to SD/USB function), but others can get along over to your USB storage or SD card. So the irony here is, to offload an app to your SD safely, you are probably going to need to download another app. It’s called App 2 SD and it’s free on the Android Market. It will let you know which ones are good to go and then you can move them all to an external or internal storage unit at once. You can still perform the same function with any version of Android 2.2 or higher by using the Settings, but it doesn’t clear up app cashes, which may lead to issues.

Dropbox

It is a fantastic app in general, but the free account comes with 2GB of storage space. Ta-Da! If need be, you can even get up to 8GB by shelling out referrals or going social. The app lets you sync and store remotely. It works with all platforms, but may not download and sync all files like it does for your desktop.
Though Dropbox is the commanding favorite, there are other cloud storage services as well: Sugar SyncZ(5), ZumoDrive(2GB), Box.net(5GB), and Sorami (25GB).

Get Old Photos and Vids off Your Phone

Some people keep enough pictures into their photo gallery to impress the Louvre. It is often overlooked as to how much space these things actually take up. Try to save pics and vids to your SD card, save them on your PC, publish them to Facebook, and then delete them off the device. If not that way, then save them in the cloudby using Google’s Picasa service.

If you are just curious as to what is taking up room on your device and where, you may want to look into the app DiskUsage. Again, I know that downloading yet another app to deal with freeing up space seems asinine, but this one will provide a wicked visualization of both the phone’s internal and SD storage spaces.

=== About the Author ===

Jon Hosier is the Marketing Manager for Phonebooks.com, a site geared towards offering visitors free access to online phone and people searches, as well as easy searches of US phone numbers, people, addresses and more. Jon has been writing on the mobile and tech industries for the last few years.

The worst possible time to make a backup is probably right after a computer crash, but that’s precisely the time when most computer users stop and consider doing so.

For most users backup isn’t a top priority, so they often forget to create regular scheduled backups, in case the worst happens.

However, with the introduction of online backup services, it’s now possible to create and upload backup of your files automatically, the software program runs in the background and uploads all your files onto the server whenever they are saved. This means you have a current and reliable backup to restore from.

There are numerous free online backup services out there, and in this post I will review 4 of the best.

SugarSync

Formerly known as Sharpcast, offers 5GB of online backup space, free for life, it supports automatic file synchronisation which allows you to keep your libraries updated across all your computers. Storage space is upgradable to 10GB if you refer friends, both gaining 500MB each.

Dropbox

Dropbox offers 2GB of free storage space, and is popular amongst computer geeks due to its support for Linux. While 2GB isn’t a lot of storage space, you can upgrade your free account by referring your friends; students get 500MB for each referral, and non-students get 250MB. The max free storage space allowed for students is 16GB and for non students it’s 8GB.

OpenDrive

OpenDrive offers 5GB storage space for free; it has features similar to SugarSync and Dropbox with automatic backups and synchronization abilities. Although it does provide ample space for free account holders, the space is not upgradable by referring friends. I also don’t like the fact that OpenDrive places a watermark on your images if you decide to share them on forums.

Mozy

Mozy is one of the most popular online backup companies out there, and offers 2GB of free storage space. We like the clean interface of Mozy, which is very easy to use. It has bandwidth throttling features to prevent it from clogging up your internet connection.

Out of all of these services, which I have personally tested, SugarSync is my favourite as it has a good 5GB storage space, straight out of the cuff, and is expandable to 10GB which is an impressive amount of storage space.

=== About the Author ===

Guest post written by Abdul Karim, a tech enthusiast, Windows fan and writer for the online backup services website

We have covered a lot of services in the past for sharing images and files online. However, I just came across a really dead-simple app to share files and images with anyone using just drag and drop.

Minus provides a simple way to share your images and files online with an easy to use drag and drop interface. You can simply drag a file from your computer and drop it on the Min.us website and it will automatically start uploading the content. Once the upload is complete, you can then easily share the image or file online using the link provided by Minus.

Minus also provides desktop tools for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The desktop tools also provide an easy way to drag and drop files to upload them to Min.us. It also provides a sharing tool for Android with support for iPhone and Blackberry coming soon. If you want to upload files using your browser, Minus provides a Google Chrome Extension with support for Firefox coming soon. All these tools can be downloaded from http://min.us/pages/tools.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Overall Minus is a great app which allows you to quickly share files and images without the hassles. I could not find any easier way to share content online.

What I would like to see though is the ability to easily post the uploaded images to Facebook and Twitter within the app, that would make it perfect. So go ahead and start sharing your content with ease at http://min.us/

Rating: 4.5/5 (Excellent)

[Sponsored] Consider this. Back in 1995, a 2GB hard drive used to cost a bomb, today you can get 5GB space online for free without having to worry about losing your data. There are several such online storage providers who provide users with free storage space, one of them is IDrive, who provide users which a simple and safe way to back up their files online.

So how is IDrive different from any other backup service? They provide 150GB of storage space for only $4.95 a month. I haven’t seen any other providers who provide so much disk space for that low. Secondly, you get 2GB free for life and can refer the service to friends to win an additional 10GB free space.

IDrive also provides several important features such as file archiving and versioning so that you can restore a previous version of a file even if you have changed it. It also backs up USB drives, external hard drives and mapped drives which are not physically attached to your computer.

Another interesting feature about IDrive is that you can backup any files, including music, videos, photos and more and do not have any bandwidth limits. Considering how good all this sounds, here are my tests of the IDrive client.

Once you download the IDrive client, you can either sign in to it, or create a new account, the process is simple and hardly takes a minute. If you are signing up for the first time, you can choose to use a encryption key or choose to use a default one. It is advisable to create and use your own encryption key. Please remember to store you encryption key somewhere safe or you won’t be able to retrieve your data.

IDrive also provides users with a plugin using which you can access you IDrive content in Windows Explorer.   You can browse and access all your files from your IDrive just like would be browsing a regular folder on your computer.

As I had told earlier a free IDrive account provides users with 2GB free storage space, however, IDrive also provides a referral program using which you can earn an additional 10GB storage space.

Once you have setup IDrive, it will automatically choose the folders to backup. Of course you can change all the folders and allow choose a scheduling time to backup your files. After you have backed up your files, you can access them from anywhere using the IDrive client or a web browser.

Overall, IDrive provides an easy way to backup files to the cloud and access them from anywhere. The service is free to use and you don’t have any obligation to pay unless you want to upgrade your storage space. Also IDrive seems to have good ratings from both users and the PC Mag editors where the PC Mag editors rated them as 3^1/2 out of 5 and users rated them 3 out of 5.

IDrive is available for downloads on both Windows and Max OS X and can be downloaded from here. IDrive is also running a promotion, where they are offering a free 5GB account and a $10 iTunes card if you download their app for iPhone, BlackBerry or Android and follow certain steps. To learn more about the promotion visit this page.

Disclaimer: All views in this post are unbiased and true.

The Online file storage  battle seems to be heating up. After Box.net increased their free storage space to 5GB, another sync service, SugarSync, has increased their free online storage  space to 5GB.

SugarSync syncs your files across multiple platforms like Windows,  Mac OS X, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. The service provides users with a desktop client which can then be used to sync files to the SugarSync servers.

The new 5GB free accounts will be available to both old and new users. SugarSync also provides a business account which provides users with 30GB space for $4.99 a month. If you do not have a SugarSync account, you can sign up for a free account to get 5GB storage space.

Also Read: 5 Services to Backup and Sync your Files

Online File Storage and collaboration service Box.net has bumped their free storage space to 5GB from 1GB and business storage to 500GB from 15GB. This makes them one of the largest online storage space provider right now.

Also Read: How To Mount Box.net Storage in Windows Explorer

Box.net, one of the online file storage services has increased their free storage space from 1GB to 5GB which will now allow users to store a large amount of files online. They have also announced that they will be increasing their business storage from 15GB to 500GB whilst allowing enterprise users to store unlimited files in the cloud.

Business and enterprise users who have been using services such as SharePoint, Google Docs and Sales Force get an added advantage here. However, for personal users, services like Dropbox which offer 2GB space and additional space for recommendations along with Windows Live SkyDrive which offers 25GB storage space along with Windows Live Mesh which providers users with 5GB sync space are more lucrative offers.

Box.net has built several data-centers to protect data along with also using Amazon’s S3 service promise better security for the files and documents stored with their service. I believe that this additional storage is definitely something which will cheer up users, both personal and business.

If you use Box.net, you might want to read up on how to use it as a local storage space in Windows. You can also access Windows Live SkyDrive from Windows Explorer.

(Source: CNET)