Free stuff rules, this is almost universally-agreed upon. Like the bastard progeny of Philip Glass's "Etude #08", however, sometimes the search for freebies can degenerate into a cyclically-frustrating revolving door of catches and "too good to be true". A good example are offers like this with the little bullet point indicating it's not fully free — you still have to pay shipping and handling. WTH? Yes, it's cheaper than normal, but $2.95 ain't free, no matter what currency it's in.

So, no tricks.

Recently, I've been looking for free file storage online. Someplace to put my Spectre VR and Second Life movies and even MP3s of my music. One of the first places I came across was Box.net offering 1 GB free, which has fully Web 2.0-compliant design, but as I always do, I clicked through to read the fine print. In this case, filesize for free accounts is maxed out at 10 MB. Hardly sufficient.

Googles later led me to Eggdisk. No idea why it has this name, I only know that free accounts (I didn't see an option for paid ones) have 6 GB file storage, and a file can be up to 150 MB. Which is dandy enough to take on some pretty meaty movies. Another important figure: max monthly — every 30 days from the time you start — downloadable bandwidth is 30 GB. And in their words, "No fees, no catch, just eggjoy!"

Amusingly, the site is bombarded with advertisements. It's a hornet's nest of text blurbs and animated banners, and some of the ads interestingly appear to be for competitors. Well, if you can't beat 'em…

Of note is you can use the service anonymously, but you'll be limited to a 20MB filesize. For voyeurs, there's a photostream of sorts.

I took a minute (literally) and signed up, and I've been using Eggdisk for some weeks now. (The interface would look amazingly clean and uncluttered without the many ads.) What's really lovely here is unlike some sites like RapidShare, there's no intermediary "you must wait" screens enroute to your download. That's right, you can link directly to what you've uploaded!

Uploading is done via a simple web form. I wish there was FTP access, and my uploads seem a bit on the pokey side for my connection. Not asking too much, but a live progress bar like YouTube does would be nice. Once your files are uploaded, you can sort them into folders, and what's especially practical is you can specify whether a file is private, hidden (can only get it if you know the URL), or public. A tidy Usage Statistics meter on the left helps you keep in check, and most of the requisite elements are clear to access.

Even better, besides my enthusiasm to share good free stuff, another reason why I'm writing this is because, according to the Official Eggdisk Blog ("everyone has a blog nowadays!"), you can get your filespace boosted to 7 GB if you write a review or blogroll 'em!

Because it inevitably gets asked, here's their current list of allowed filetypes:

And a really, really nice feature that I found super-useful is, you can .zip a lot of files and upload the resulting archive, and choose to have the contents extracted as separate files. Efficient if you want to save your clicky mouse finger on the web upload form when sending lotsa images. (I primarily use Photobucket and Flickr for my image hosting, but it's sage to keep the channels of possibilities open.)

Eggdisk's longterm reliability remains to be seen — I am sad at how some of my old ImageShack images were lost after some of their drives blew and they had no backups. But, I'll continue traveling on this track and do followup accordingly. Thankfully, I don't see any mention of "We'll delete your files if they're not accessed in X amount of days". Apparently there's somewhere in the neighborhood of *gasp* only ~4,500 registered users as I type this. I'm surprised word hasn't gotten out more… yet.

A couple caveats: you can only create 5 folders at a time. This is an oddly low limit. Also, while it's nice preview thumbnails are generated for images, linking to them exposes a link to the enclosing folder if it's hidden (and making it private means you have to move the image out of that folder to be viewable). For consideration, you may want to read some other opinions too.

Anyway, if you want to give Eggdisk a go, I highly recommend it based on what I've experienced so far! I hope Chris and the crew behind it continue to improve their services. And as I can now quip, "If there's such thing as a free lunch, it might as well be called an Eggdisk!"