Yahoo Briefcase

Time and again a student comes to me with a damaged or corrupted floppy disk. In other instances they saved their paper to the hard drive instead of their floppy disk. There is a nice solution to student academic paper storage available to those who have a Yahoo! account, and that is Yahoo! briefcase. Yahoo allows a user to store up to 30 Mb online, plenty for those expository writing papers and other homework, via their briefcase interface.

The location of your briefcase is at http://briefcase.yahoo.com/username where username is your own username. Briefcase are private unless you make them public. Yahoo! seems happy to keep files online rather indefinitely.

In the image below the user yattapiyuul has logged into Yahoo! and then accessed their briefcase. In this instance the user could not find a link, so after logging in he typed http://briefcase.yahoo.com and Yahoo! automatically carried his log in over to his briefcase area.

Click on Add files to add a file...

Choose a folder to put the file into. Note that this user had already done the initial folder setup during the summer of 2005. Click on Select when done.

Click on browse to add a file, this will open a standard file open dialog box. Choose the file.

In this instance I uploaded a small 4 kilobyte thumbnail image.

At the bottom of the file upload list is an upload button, click on it. The attachments can take a long time to upload to Yahoo. Be patient! When done, Yahoo will confirm successful upload after some length of time.

Click on Back to Folder.

The image file is shown in the folder along with a file I uploaded last summer.

Clicking on the word Data in the Name column prompts a download, with FireFox asking for confirmation of the download. Thus you can access a file from anywhere on the planet. Clicking on an image file in a format that FireFox recognizes causes FireFox to display the image. Other browsers will work in a similar way.

30 megabytes is about 20 floppy disks, more than enough for most students and probably many faculty and staff.