BANGALORE, INDIA: Every one of us, for n number of times, has heard the A for Apple, B for Boy A-Z nursery sequence. Well, let’s try the following for a change.

A for Amazon, B for Box, C for Carbonite, D for Dropbox, E for Elephantdrive, F (well let that remain the same old Frog), G for GDrive, again jump H, i for iCloud etc etc etc.

Gone are the days when audio cassettes, CDs, VCDs, DVDs, photo albums, digital albums, computer drives, external hard drives and USB sticks used to be, of course CDs and USB are still very much in use, the place where photos, audio, video and music files were stored.

Today, online storage and back-ups are the new age hard drives, which reside not in personal devices or at home, but up in the sky, to be precise in cloud.

This is an attempt to look at a little less than a dozen of those popular sites,  purely in alphabetical order -  Adrive, Amazon drive, Box, Carbonite, Dropbox, ElephantDrive, iStorage, iDrive, Mozy and SungarSync.

Google’s GDrive doesn't figure in this list, just for the reason that it is not yet live.

So, here we go:

1. Adrive

Online storage and back-up site Adrive is by far the only one which provides 50GB of online free storage.

One can upload, store, share and access files anywhere with Adrive.

Other features include integrated Zoho technology to allow users edit word processing documents and spreadsheets online. ADrive supports Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, and Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix operating systems.

ADrive offers three types of services:
Basic: Storage Capacity (per account) is 50GB and is meant only for individual use for free of charge.

Signature: Storage capacity (per account) is 50GB with choice of 100GB, 250GB, 500GB, and 750GB for $6.95 monthly and $69.50 annual charge 

Premium: Storage capacity (per account) is 1TB to 10TB for starting at $13.95 monthly and starting at $139.50 annual fee. 

ADrive Signature and Premium account users will have SSL data encryption included in their storage plans.

2. Amazon Cloud Drive 

This starts with an initial 5 GB of free online storage space. Additional storage space will cost:
20 GB $20/year
50 GB $50/year
200 GB $200/year
500 GB $500/year
1000 GB $1000 / year

Amazon Cloud Drive gives access to Amazon Cloud Player, one can play or download Cloud Drive music on Android device using Amazon Cloud Player for Android.

Amazon Cloud Drive allows access from up to eight devices. This includes mobile devices, different computers, and different browsers on the same computer.