I find myself asking, “Just how much storage do we need?” With digital photography, ebooks, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos - all this data takes up space. And with so many people having smartphones these days, everyone needs someplace to store all those pictures and videos. My smartphone has more computing power and storage space than the desktop computer I had in college. In fact, I have individual files that would probably each take up most of the hard drive on the PC I had back then. Now, though, not only do I have a little over a terabyte of total storage on my current PC, but I have a shade over 80GB of storage online (not counting Gmail, or Yahoo Mail). Here’s the breakdown of the cloud storage I currently have:
- Dropbox - 2GB free
- Box - 50GB free (normally only 5GB, but I got 50GB for free during a promo for downloading their free Android app a couple of months ago)
- SkyDrive 25GB for free (another free promo - SkyDrive recently changed their free storage to 7GB, but I got to keep the 25GB for free since I was already signed up for it)
- Google Drive - 5GB
And here’s a chart, courtesy of ‘Geeks are Sexy’, that shows the various cloud services and their costs:
So, Google Drive, in my opinion, seems a day late and a dollar short, considering how much competition there already is for cloud storage service. So far, I’ve only found a handful of practical reasons to use them. The first being sharing files between my PC, laptop and smartphone easily. It was, when I was job hunting, useful to have my resume in the Public folder on Dropbox for easy sharing with prospective employers. Other than that, I’m currently in the process of sorting and uploading all of my role playing game PDFs to my Box account (since it has the largest chunk of space) so they’re readily available for gaming night, even if I’m not at home.
So, the real question, for me anyway is, do I need all of this online storage? No. No I don’t. Not really. Mostly, I think I have all this cloud storage because, well, everyone offers free space in some amount and free stuff is almost always cool, and most offer Android apps even for the Nook (except SkyDrive - what’s up with that Microsoft?) and being a gadget and technology geek, it’s just cool to have them all.
Then there’s the debate about what should and shouldn’t be uploaded to ‘the Cloud’ like sensitive data. Naturally, anything uploaded that’s of a sensitive nature should be encrypted. For me, though, nothing is uploaded that would really need encryption. Data that I don’t want getting into the “wrong hands” stays on my PC’s hard drive, not the Cloud.
There are plenty of Cloud storage services out there to choose from, some free and some not. Pick any one, or several, of your choosing. Frankly, I don’t see any overwhelming differences between any of them that would make me endorse one in particular.
~ JC
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2 comments:
The Verge has a run-though of four different EULAs when it comes to your privacy/content: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2973849/google-drive-terms-privacy-data-skydrive-dropbox-icloud
Right now Google is not too popular due to theirs: https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226582/Privacy_advocates_slam_Google_Drive_s_privacy_policies?taxonomyId=158&pageNumber=2
More on topic: right now I've got three computers (iMac, Windows desktop and laptop), so I'm uploading my music from the desktop so I can synchronise my collection across them. Sadly, I'm stuck with OSX 10.6 due to all my DTP programs, so no OSX 10.7 or Skydrive for it. Oh well.
Got to reap some of the benefits last night, playing music that synced onto my laptop ^_^
Another thing I forgot to point out is that Google Drive and Dropbox both have apps for Windows and Android that auto-synch and both create folders on my PC so all I have to do is drag and drop to the respective folder.
Kind of wish Box had that since, with it being the largest of my Cloud storage services, I'm in the process of copying most, if not all, of my RPG material to it.
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