After being with LiveDrive.com since April of 2009, and suffering through many a release I decided I needed to find a workable solution for my basement lab and home data. I found OnlineStorageSolution.com

They are currently 15 bucks a year via Paypal, and offer unlimited remote storage and unlimited size of files. I use their rsync feature almost exclusively. It just plain works.

They have a ftp server, as well as webDaV support for use with the Mac OS, and for users of NetDrive on Windows platforms. They also have a functional albeit open sourced web portal. It works okay as well but has it’s limitations. You can even give share ability to your friends to upload and download from the web interface only.

It’s cheap, functional, and does what I need. Store my data. No silly clients to load and screw your machines up.

If you download the recommended software for rsync gui on windows be sure to hunt down the UTF8 compatible cygwin1.dll or you will have lot’s of filepath issues. Rsync from the command line on OSX works out of the box.

Support is a bit iffy. Sometimes notes go unanswered for weeks, but if you happen to get one of the owners, they are quite responsive and quick to fix things.

If you need a service that will allow you access when you need it, then Online Storage Solution (OSS) is not for you. I know Petar, and I tried them out for a while based on his overwhelming sastisfaction. But every time I needed to access the service, they were down. If you go to your file portal on the web and check available free space, it’s often well less than a terabyte, and the service is always being brought down to swap out drives. I ended up writing scripts that would ping the service to let me know when I could get online and access my files. It turned out that on average, it was down about a fourth of any given day. I never got one single reply from support. Petar’s excuse is, you get what you pay for. This all may be OK for some, but not for me.

After using OSS for nearly 4 months I find that I must provide an update to my first review.

Yes, they are incredibly inexpensive. Support is via email or you might get someone at the phone number. The site indeed recycles the services a LOT multiple times per day.

Storage appears to brought online on-demand. Many times during my rsync uploads it will fail and the timeouts and retries in the DeltaCopy client have to kick in and restart the process of uploading multiple times per day.

The latest incident LOST just over 200 GIGS of data previously uploaded through rsync. It appears accounts are manually balanced and permissions and files suffer in the move from array to array sometimes.

Best of luck. When it works I still think they are great for the price. The problem is that they are frequently having issues which makes the proposition iffy.

I have tested OLS and found that transfer speeds (using FileZilla) were disappointingly low in general (sometimes reasonable, mostly bad). My e-mails about these technical issues were initially responded to promptly but at the end of the day the performance issues were not solved.

When I informed OLS that I did not want to continue the service I was promised a money-back and removal of the account. I have asked at least a dozen times to effectuate this, but, until today, my account is still alive and the money was not returned. My e-mail requests were not answered any more. I asked the credit card company to undo the payment hoping my account would then be closed, after all. Alas, when this was settled still no (re-)action from OLS.

I realize that for so little money, one’s expectations should be proportional. I don’t blame OLS for poor performance, therefore. What makes me feel really uncomfortable is the fact that the simple administrative action of removing the account is not accomplished, in spite of their promise and in spite of my repeated requests. I just want to be “out of OLS” and cannot get it done – so far. That IS bad, don’t you think so?