Looking for some free online storage? Why not give Microsoft’s new Windows Live SkyDrive service a try? (Although yes.. we are talking about Microsoft here.. but oh well!) The company removed the “beta” tag from the SkyDrive service on Thursday and upped the amount of storage space available for each user to 5GB. If you have a Windows Live account, you automatically have the SkyDrive service available already. You can create personal folders, shared folders, as well as public folders that everyone else can view. Clearly, online storage is a key component to any large scale Internet portal offering and thus it’s critical that Microsoft offer the SkyDrive service to Live users.

I took SkyDrive for a brief spin just a moment ago and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Windows Home Server user interface (and that’s not a bad thing either!). Again, there are three sections – Personal Folders, Shared Folders (shared with friends), and Public Folders (shared to everyone on the net). By default, you get four personal folders – Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos but you can create additional personal folders as well as folders within the default four folders. Each folder can have specified “readers” and “editors”.

You can upload files one at a time or use an ActiveX component to drag and upload files to the service. I prefer the ActiveX component since it’s far easier to use if you’re dealing with a large number of files. If I have one complaint thus far, it’s not being able to easily move files from folder to folder within the online storage service. I could be wrong here but I just can’t find a “move” option. Surely a bummer since I’d have to re-upload the file if I wanted to move files around.

However, SkyDrive certainly appears to be a snappy service thus far and the UI is definitely a welcome sight for those used to other Windows Live services.

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Technorati Tags: Windows Live SkyDrive, Online Storage