Get Access to 25GB of Free Cloud Storage from Windows Explorer

I adore DropBox -- 2GB of online storage, fully integrated into Windows Explorer, so I can copy files among different PCs and locations as easily as if they were all networked in the same office.

The only downside? It's just 2GB. I wish DropBox had SkyDrive's generous 25GB capacity. Well, I've found the next best thing.

SkyDrive Explorer installs access to SkyDrive in Windows Explorer, so you can copy files to and from SkyDrive from any folder in Windows. That's DropBox's trick, but with 10 times as much free storage. Very cool. The only limitation? Microsoft caps the maximum size of any single file to 50MB, probably to keep you from streaming movies over the Internet on their dime. But for the vast majority of business applications, that's no problem at all.

SkyDrive Explorer is kind of an unusual little duck; it is a free 3rd party add-on for SkyDrive -- it doesn't come from the Windows Live team. The Web site makes this app look like the work of one enthusiastic developer who is far better with dev-speak than plain English. "SkyDrive Explorer allows applying some operations for group of objects that is not possible in web browser," the site says, for instance. Geek-to-English translation: You can use SkyDrive Explorer to bulk rename and delete files, just like you can in any Windows folder.

It mostly works as advertised, but I ran into a few difficulties. Image previews in Windows 7 don't work, so you can't select a SkyDrive file and see its contents in the Preview pane (in comparison, this works just fine with DropBox). And despite the feature touted above, I found that bulk file renames failed silently.

Those glitches aside, this is a great step forward for SkyDrive users. Here's to hoping that the author keeps updating this tool, or Microsoft rolls out something similar without the rough edges.