From the early days of the Internet, people's lives have constantly evolved towards stronger bonds with the world wide web. From the sign up of your first email account to ICQ and IRC, the oh-so-ugly webpages on Geocities to today's social networking trend still growing stronger, everything went by in the blink of an eye. While this overexposion of one's privacy is great for some people, I could honestly go on living without it. But different strokes for different folks and apparently people have fun doing that, so who am I to judge?

Although social networking isn't my thing, i must recognize this trend has come up with some pretty useful web services and sparked the whole concept of cloud computing that I'm really interested in. What has impressed me most than anything else lately was the online storage services that started popping up everywhere.

When I first heard about it I was very interested, because I really don't like burning backups to DVDs, I don't think it's a reliable storage device, so I keep backups on hard drives. But when you get a severe hard drive failure like I had recently and all the data goes up in flames - something has to change. That's when I stumbled across the concept of using online storage for backups, and it makes all the sense in the world to me. Web servers are computers and systems thought out to handle data storage in the most secure and efficient way, so you can't go wrong - it will be safer than any hard drive you bought at Wal-mart.

Having decided to give online storage a try, there were a lot of services to choose from. Of course the big boys quickly jumped on the bandwagon and Microsoft lauched Skydrive, but I like placing my trust in the smaller start-ups that need help getting off the ground. So I went looking for them and found a lot of free and paid online storage services offering from 5GB to 50GB. After sorting them out I ended up with Humyo and ADrive.

ADrive is a very nice service. It has proven reliable for the months I've been using it, and, although it's not the slickest interface you've ever seen, if you're looking for a lot of free storage space to keep your files, then ADrive's 50GB will suit you just fine. It has no filesize limit, allows you to upload and download your files in bulk and even to edit your documents with Zoho editor.

But IMO Humyo is, hands down, the best online storage service - be it the free or the premium version. The free version does have two pitfalls when compared to ADrive: you'll get only 10 GB of storage space (5GB for media files - audio, photo and video - and 5GB for other files) and you can't download more than one file at a time. But on the other hand, Humyo has a beautiful user-friendly interface that allows you to bulk upload all your files and manage them like you'd do with a local file manager, creating, deleting and renaming files and folders within a couple of clicks. It also has the social networking side that allows you to share your files with your friends and family that have an account on Humyo or make them public and share a link to them. But what really won me over was Humyo's media player, that allows you to stream your music and videos or even create a slideshow of your photos directly from the site, no need to download or install anything. The streaming is really smooth, with no choppiness, and you can even embed Humyo's player on your website or blog.

But the great minds at Humyo took their service a step (or several steps) further. With a premium account, you'll get access to 100GB of online storage and be able to download an application called SmartDrive, that will create a virtual hard drive on your windows or mac computer that is automatically synchronized with your Humyo account and all other computers you install this app on. This way you can edit your files offline and as soon as there's an Internet connection SmartDrive will send the new files to Humyo. This is really one of those set-and-forget systems; the day your need your files, the backup will be there. Using Humyo premium, you can access your files from any computer with internet and you'll be able to manage, upload and download files even from your mobile phone.

Another cool feature is the Zoho Office Suite and Snipshot integration, which allow you to view and edit your documents and pictures in any computer with no need to open accounts, install software or purchase licenses.

Humyo is an amazing online storage service and you'll have a hard time finding something better. If all you want is to store some files to access from home, work or school, you will probably be fine with ADrive or Humyo Free, but if you'd like a backup solution that's so much more than that, I highly recommend you take Humyo Premium for a test drive with the 14-day free trial. This service is really a must-have.