BT provides users with Digital Vault

If you are away from your main computer a lot, but need secure access to a collection of files, then you might well find the solution to that problem in a new offering from BT. The company has unveiled a service that provides a secure online location for broadband users to safely stash personal files.

There are two versions of this new service. One is the free BT Digital Vault Basic service, which allows users to upload photos, emails, music, video files and contact information up to a storage capacity of 2GB. For those in the market for something meatier, BT also offers a full BT Digital Vault service, which costs £4.99 a month and will provide you with a healthy 20GB online storage capacity.

Ideal for home users as a means of quickly and easily backing up their data, the Digital Vault service includes the BT Digital Vault Backup Manager which automatically detects when users have updated the content of files which they have added to backup sets. The manager can then synchronise the data with the online version.

A nice idea, but currently limited to users of Windows 2000 and XP, so you Mac-heads and Linux freaks are out of luck for the moment.