As people move more of their information onto the cloud and rely on servers in faraway lands, backups have become an issue. You may elect to occasionally download your online records to your own computer, but if you use a large number of cloud services, the process of backing them all up will soon become time consuming. As usual in such cases of Internet need, geeks have figured out a way to monetise this new service niche. Backupify (a rather unlovely business name) offers a one-stop backup service for all of your cloud services, including GMail, Twitter, Basecamp, Flickr and more. If you are comfortable with their pricing, then your only worry is handing all that potentially personal information on to a third party, whatever their strict privacy policies.

Many Internet Service Providers place a fairly low limit on the size of email attachments they will allow. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) offers an alternative for moving large files, but the receiver needs to have their server configured to receive such files. Other options include uploading files to your own website (if such you possess) and emailing the file location to the intended recipient.  However, if you only need to send large files occasionally, and to a range of people, YouSendIt is a far simpler solution.

At this stage the ‘Lite’ level of service is free. The user simply joins at www.yousendit.com, enters the recipient’s email and a brief message, locates the file (or zipped collection of files) to be sent and presses the “Send It” button. The receiver soon receives an email inviting her to download the waiting file — a one-click process. YouSendit offers pay-per-use services also, featuring document tracking, online storage facilities and the ability to send even larger files.  YouSendIt now offers plugins for use within Outlook, Acrobat, Photoshop and others, so users can send files directly from their native application.

So far, YouSendIt is all upside. Perhaps email as a medium will eventually adapt to the new demands placed upon it, but until then YouSendIt is an elegant stop-gap.