Skydrive is the latest Windows Live service to be offered. Using your Windows Live ID, you have 5000 megabytes of free - yes, free - storage online for your documents, photos and videos. You can use Skydrive to backup your important files, share some files with selected contacts, or upload files to be shared with everybody.

To get started, go to http://skydrive.live.com, scroll down to the Get Started button, sign in to your Windows Live ID and you're away.

Now you'll see the three types of folders: Personal, Shared and Public. Your Personal Folders already have folders for your documents, music, pictures and photos, and videos.

Over on the right-hand side of the page you'll see we haven't started using up any of our free 5 gigabytes of storage.

Let's upload some photos to our pictures folder. So click Pictures to get to the next screen and click on Pictures.

Now we get the page where we can upload and add files to our online Pictures folder.

You'll see you can only upload five files at once unless you install the Upload Tool. To do the latter, you need to be in an administrator account, so if need be, change over, go to Live Skydrive to download and install the upload tool - you'll be glad you do!

Now when you come back to add files to your folders, you can drag 'n' drop your files from your folders on the hard drive onto the Drag files here box.

For photos, the easiest way to find those you want to upload is to use Live Photo Gallery. webDotWiz wants to upload his aloe vera photos so here's easily found them because they're tagged.

You need to be able to see the dotted box when you've loaded Live Photo Gallery (or your My Documents folder, for example) when you drag 'n' drop. When done, your file is shown as ready to be uploaded.

You might have more to upload so resize Live Photo Gallery so you can still see part of the dotted box.

Now we've got this list ready to upload.

Click the Upload button and the screen refreshes to let you know how things are progressing.

A little bit later:

When your files are uploaded, you'll see them in your online folder. webDotWiz uploaded photos and thumbnails are displayed.

And wow, look at all that storage space still to be used.

Once your files are on Skydrive, you can access them from any computer that connects to the web. So you can save a file at home and download it at work to make some changes, save it again to its Skydrive folder and access it from home. In other words, Skydrive is your mobile thumbnail drive that you can't lose!

Some notes about using Skydrive:

• you can create folders and load files into them so you're more organised
• for documents, you can create Document folders on Skydrive that correspond to folders in your My Documents folder on your computer
• you'll want to think about the names of folders for your photos (e..g, you could use folder names corresponding to tags you use in Live Photo Gallery)
• it appears there's a maximum of nine sub-folders that you can create within a folder
• if your Internet Service Provider counts the size of files uploaded as well as what you download each month, be careful of your month's quota so you're not charged extra for the service.

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