Is it any wonder that most storage industry professionals are predicting 2010 to be the Year of Cloud Storage?

More and more companies are coming up with—or will shortly make available—online storage services. The more established ones, such as EMC Mozy, Carbonite, Amazon S3, Box.net, DropBox, NovaBackup, Iron Mountain Digital and Symantec, are scooping up new users right and left.

Even newcomers like Backblaze, Egnyte and Seagate i365 reportedly are also doing well.

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But there's still a lot of room for newcomers. One of them, the U.K.-based Livedrive will introduce Livedrive Backup on Dec. 1, a company source told eWEEK.

What sets Livedrive, which offers unlimited storage like all the rest, apart?

"In addition to keeping a copy of files online, users can download them at any time or view them online. Unlike other solutions, Livedrive is constantly backing up in the background—you just install it and never need to worry about it ever again. There's nothing to configure, check, schedule, run, et cetera," Livedrive executive Jamie Brown wrote in his blog.

Livedrive also includes a music player for users' Web portals, Brown said.

The company also has a second service, Backup & Briefcase, that combines its standard Livedrive Backup with Livedrive Briefcase, which is the company's access-anywhere product.

"When you install Livedrive Briefcase, you get a new drive added—drive L:—where you can put files that you use regularly," Brown said. "These files are stored on your hard drive, and you can use them just like normal files, but they are also copied online so that you can access them from any Web browser."

Livedrive Backup costs $6.95 per month. Most of the older services go for $4.95 or $5.95 per month for unlimited storage. Backup & Briefcase goes for $16.95 per month.

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