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So far in our series exploring cloud computing for consumers, we've looked at calendars and music. In the multi-device world we now live in, files from your computer are also increasingly being stored in the cloud.

One of the leading Internet companies of this era is essentially a hard drive in the cloud. Dropbox, by some measures the world's 5th most valuable startup, makes it easy for you to sync files across devices. There are other, similar services too. Or you can go completely virtual by using an online office suite like Google Docs. In this article we outline some of the ways that you too can use the cloud to store your files.

Online backup provider Mozy has added a new twist to their service called Data Shuttle: they will overnight you a 1.8 TB external hard drive, which you can use to create your initial backup seed. When you have copied all your files to the drive with their software, you mail it back to their data center, and they copy it to their cloud-based service. This is somewhat similar to what Amazon offers and is a fast way to get going with your initial backup if you have a slow broadband connection.

The service currently works with their Windows v2.8 client. The Mac client will be available later in October with a new 2.4 version to enable the shuttle drive process. The fee is $275 for the initial drive. Up to 7 TB per account can be stored.

Symform is an online data protection and disaster recovery service who have been around for a few years, using a rather unique storage method. They start with having no data center to store their files, but leverage the kindness of strangers.

WatchDox is extending its services to the private cloud. We've written about them in the past. They have an iPad app for document control and tracking, and have added Android and soon Blackberry versions as well.

The war that the record labels is waging to protect its copyrighted music is mistakenly believed to only concern services that explicitly allow you to share music.

That's not so true anymore. The RIAA is broadening its scope. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Its new targets are services such as Box.net, the subject of a subpoena this week in California, served by the RIAA's vice president of online piracy, Mark McDevitt. The RIAA seeks information about people it believes are using Box to illegally use "sound recordings."

In a prepared statement, Box.net said to The Hollywood Reporter:

Google recently joined a lawsuit as a friend of MP3tunes, a service that will face off on Friday against EMI, the giant record label that seems to be in continual financial distress.

The lawsuit will unfold in a New York federal courtroom, with a band of lawyers from EMI squaring off against an online service that provides storage in the cloud for media.

According to MP3tunes Founder Michael Robertson, at stake in this case is whether a corporation can store digital assets for a consumer to access later. Google is supporting MP3tunes as its services depend on the ability for its users to store document, media files and associated data.

There is no dearth of streaming music services on the web today, so it takes quite a bit for a new service to stand out from other popular services like Spotify, MOG and Lala. Today, we came across Bitspace, an online music player and backup service for your music files that puts an interesting new spin on this subject. This service stands out because of its great design and the fact that it's fully based on HTML5.

Gladinet, a desktop software program aimed at connecting users to their online storage, is fast becoming the go-to program for Windows users looking to map desktop drives to their favorite web services. Already, users of the software have been able to add network drives that connect to Amazon's S3, Box.net, and Windows Live SkyDrive, among others. Additionally, the program makes cloud to cloud backup and migration between services as easy as drag-and-drop.

Today, the company is announcing the addition of Google Storage, a service nicknamed "GDrive" among Internet users, to its lineup of supported options.

Google just announced dramatically reduced prices for their online storage options via a post on the company's Official Google Blog. The new rates give you 20 GB for $5 per year, or, as Google puts it "twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price." The new options also let you expand your storage all the way up to 16 TB if need be. As always, these extra storage options are available once you reach the limit of your free storage.

However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There's no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there's definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We're beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?

Quanp, a new service from office electronics company Ricoh, has just launched a beta of their online storage system which offers an interesting twist to the usual backup services: a visual search tool that displays your data in 3D. The 3D viewer is actually a desktop application designed for Windows PCs, but Mac users aren't entirely out of luck - there is an online version of the service, too.