Microsoft’s SkyDrive offers 25GB of free space in the cloud to everyone. However, the standard product requires that you to use Microsoft’s own products to access it. Now, The Download Squad shows how to open up your SkyDrive 25GB using an Office 2010 trial copy. It is not exactly a two-step process, but it’s detailed in full at the Download Squad post. When you’re done, you get a 25GB space on your system that’s instantly synced with the cloud, accessible from the web, and can be accessed from multiple (Windows) computers. Neat stuff.
It does have the downside that files have to meet a particular Sky Drive criteria that they can not be larger than 50MB. To get around this, have a look at SDExplorer tool (windows XP and later), which integrates Microsoft SkyDrive into Windows.
Once installed, there’s not much to see with SDExplorer, it simply does what it promises. Provide your login credentials for your SkyDrive account and the drive that appears in My Computer—seen above—is linked to your online storage. You can interact with it like any other drive.
The two biggest differences between the free version and the Pro version (apart from the price) are:
* the Pro version lets you open directly files from the SDExplorer drive
* the Pro version does away with the SKyDrive limitation of 50MB per file.