+1 for drag and drop storage and file sharing with Minus

A tool I find great use with that I don’t see get enough attention is Minus. It’s a cloud storage tool that handles pretty much any kind of file, and has all sorts of nice features. You could say it’s like Dropbox or Amazon Cloud or some other tool, but I’ll tell you why I like it better.

1. It’s drag and drop. I tend to drag files straight from my desktop to the very pleasant Minus web interface. If you’ve ever used Dropbox or Amazon’s web interface, you’ll know why this is better.
2. It knows your file types, and gives them back how you use them. It knows when I’m uploading a zip file, or a picture, or a video, and it keeps the files so I can do two things quickly:
1. View them. It creates a simple viewing method for pictures, videos, text files, and probably more. No need to download and open again on your machine like on Dropbox.
2. Download them. You can also download any file on Minus, as you’d expect.
3. Custom shortlinks. Minus creates shortlinks for everything, and it acts as a private link so you can share it with just those you want to see it. You can make these links easy to remember by just clicking your custom link and editing it to a custom URL to suit your needs
4. Public / private choices. Minus is trying to be more social. I haven’t done much with this, but I like how can just publish anything you’ve uploaded to share it publicly. But either way, neither Dropbox or Amazon have a feature like this.

The Minus team is hitting the sharing aspect of their product pretty hard. But sharing with Minus isn’t the type of “sharing” I commonly think of. Minus is indeed a great sharing tool. But I tend to use it as a 1:1 or 1:few sharing tool, versus a 1:many sharing tool.

I use other tools for other things. For instance, I use Snippi for quick code snippets. And I use Cloud App for screenshots. I know Cloud App can do some of what Minus does, but Minus doesn’t limit me with the free version, and it has more versatility.

They have a pretty cool video about their product, embedded below, if you’re in the mood to watch.

So this post is just another in my quest to share, in longer form, the things I like and use on a daily basis. Minus is pretty cool.

I guess I was a pretty early adopter too. My first upload was about 7 months ago, and they’ve iterated quickly and raised some money since then, and the improvements are quite visible. The site as you see it today launched in October.

You can get 10 GB today, for free and try it yourself. Compare that to the 2 GB you get free with Dropbox or the 5 with Amazon Cloud Drive and this decision is even easier.

Note: If you join with one of the links in this post, I get a free GB of storage on Minus. Though that’s not why I wrote it, as I have plenty of storage. But I’ll always take more : )