We’re so wedded to the hard drive as a storage medium, it’s hard to spot which is the better deal. But despite the excitement of seeing terabyte drives in stores for around $300, getting unlimited storage gratis clearly offers the greater value.

Hard drives have many things going for them, the chief of which is they offer fast access to files because they’re attached to your PC. They also have many faults. They’re physically unreliable to the extent that we need to back up every scrap of data stored on them for the day when (not if) it wheezes its last. And now that we’re in the terabyte era, what’s the only realistic way we can back up a hard drive? To another hard drive, of course, hence the RAID options.

So with free, unlimited storage on offer, can it be long before we move our files online instead and drag our hard drives to the trash?

The observant – or cynical – among you will note that we’ve been here before. Since the days of Web 1.0  a number of players have offered online backup and despite the obvious promise they have failed to set the world alight.

Services such as Xdrive.com launched in an age of dial-up internet, when uploading large numbers of files was impossible for most people, and even downloading files took an age. Whether you call that bad timing or being ahead of their time, online hard drives have been stumbling along ever since.

Now we’re in the broadband era, and traffic quotas from ISPs are increasing, Xdrive.com offers 5GB of free storage but wants money from us before they dole out any more. Why bother with that when I have a 4GB USB drive on my keyring?

No, a virtual hard drive in the sky is not the way forward. Most of us fail to back up to local drives without expecting us to back up to an online drive, too.