Humyo Premium review

Most online storage services are designed to back up your files automatically over the internet to a server.

This protects your data even if disaster strikes your home or office. Humyo's online storage service can be used to back up your files, but it's designed more for sharing large files by making them accessible from any internet-connected computer. However, you can simply direct your own backup software to save your data to the Humyo drive.

For £40 a year pre-paid or £4 a month pay-as-you-go, you get 100GB of storage. A free ad-supported service is available, but is limited to just 10GB of storage and caps your upload speeds at 512Kbit/s, which isn't ideal if you regularly share large files. Unlike the premium service, the free version doesn't encrypt your uploads, which is a concern if your data is sensitive. It will also delete your files if you don't log in at least once every 90 days.

After installing Humyo's software, you can access your online storage in My Computer as if it were a local drive. Files can be copied to it in the usual manner, and the data is uploaded to Humyo's servers in the background while you work. A local copy is kept on your hard disk so you can still access your files without internet access. Any changes you make are uploaded automatically when you go online.

Disappointingly, Humyo's software can't copy selected files to your online storage according to a schedule. Neither can it automatically compress files to make the most of your storage space, and you can't adjust its upload speeds manually.

You can view and upload files using a browser, even on a smartphone, thanks to a simplified mobile version of the website. WebDAV, a successor to FTP, allows you to copy files without Humyo's software by using file-transfer programs such as BitKinex.

Humyo's website lets you generate standard hyperlinks to your files so they can be downloaded using a browser. This avoids clogging up email inboxes with large attachments or having to configure your own FTP server. If your recipients sign up for a free account, they can view your files using the slick web interface. There's a media player for playing common music and video formats, which even recognises ID3 tags in MP3 files. Photos can be organised into albums and viewed as slideshows, although when browsing photos by the date they were taken, some photos were inexplicably tagged with the wrong date. Usefully, you can search for files by filename.

Humyo is a well-designed online file-storage and sharing service, but it's not ideal for backups. Despite its limitations, the free service is sufficient for casual, occasional use. If you frequently share lots of data, however, the Premium service is well worth paying for.

Author: Alan Lu