Microsoft's SkyDrive gives you 7 gigabytes (GB) of free storage, which is a lot. If you want, you can buy another 20 GB for $20 a year. Microsoft currently aims to have the lowest cloud storage cost of all the major players, so this is quite a good deal. You can use the storage for all kinds of files - it is not just for Microsoft Office documents.
When you sign up for SkyDrive, you also get free use (if you want it) of Microsoft's online Office suite, including Outlook.com for e-mail, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. These are simplified, basic versions of these Office classics, and you don't have to download or install them. You simply use the online (in the cloud) to create and edit documents, including documents that you created on your computer using installed versions of Office. These online versions will work for most of us, but may not suffice if you use, say, a lot of fancy formatting or elaborate spreadsheet formulas.
You can use SkyDrive just on the web, or you can download a Windows app for your computer, which will create a dedicated SkyDrive folder for storing everything. Used this way, SkyDrive keeps everything in the folder backed up. If you change anything, it is promptly changed in the cloud, also. (In other words, it acts like Dropbox, but gives you more than three times as much free storage.)
Honestly, I don't use the online MS Office suite often, as I had already gotten in the habit of using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I have to admit - these free Microsoft cloud programs are really user-friendly, prettier, and have better help documentation than Google Docs. They will feel quite intuitive, especially if you are a long-time MS Office user. I find them handy for opening and editing Office documents if I am working on somebody else's computer.
And all these online Office programs, including the new web-based Outlook e-mail, have a beautiful, easy-to-read interface - better than Google for older eyes. I especially like the calendar. But I don't think Microsoft is as far along as Evernote, Dropbox, and Google in making it all accessible on a truly wide variety of mobile platforms. It doesn't work on my Blackberry, for example, and wasn't in the Kindle app store. However, there are apps for IOS, Android, and Windows mobile.
So here's how I use SkyDrive. I have it set up on my primary computer as a separate folder in Windows Explorer, with many subfolders. I store all my lesson plans and handouts here, because I always use Microsoft Word 2003 for this work. (I prefer the ease and accuracy of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) insertion, cropping, and placement of graphics into Word documents compared to any other word processing software I've used.) I also store some photos and miscellaneous letters. I've used less than 2 GB of the free 25 GB I got from Microsoft (I was grandfathered into this in some way I never figured out.) I like that everything is right on my computer, but is always current in SkyDrive's cloud.
But I use other cloud storage too, remember. I have 35 GB of free storage on Google, plus 20 GB for which I pay $4.95 a year for under a legacy plan. And Google gave me an additional 100 GB, good for two years, when I bought a Chromebook.
In addition, I clip and store a lot of web-based stuff on Evernote, which allows unlimited total storage but limits you to 60 megabytes per month in uploads. It's hard to say how much I have stored there, maybe 2 GB or so. I also have 3.75 GB of free storage on Dropbox. Amazon has given me free storage for 250 songs, plus an additional 5 GB of free cloud storage. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's a total of 75 GB of free storage, not even counting the temporary stuff from Google and the songs on Amazon!
So as you can see, most individual users will be able to store all their computer files, with plenty of room to spare, on the "free" versions of the major cloud storage services. This may change over time, but right now... the price is right!
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