Which Cloud Storage Service is Right for You?

There a ton of great options when it comes to cloud storage! Many of them are free, but some offer some interesting paid features. If you have a lot of storage needs, whether it be for business or personal use, consider these great options for cloud storage!

Google Drive: Google Drive is part of Google’s office suite, and it’s surprisingly competitive with Microsoft’s offerings. For having a Google account, you get 15GB of storage for free. For documents and pictures, 15GB is a good bit of storage! Google also offers a few packages for higher amounts of storage. For 100GB, 1TB and 10TB, you pay $2, $10 or $100 per month, respectively. Given the free Google Office suite that comes welded to this service, many offices are opting to use it.  

Google Drive has Android, iPhone and Windows apps, too! This makes it easy to sync files across multiple devices. Google Drive is ideal if you have a Chromebook, but it’s a great choice for eveeryday use too. You can’t go wrong with this one! 

Amazon Drive: Amazon Drive is a great service if you already have Amazon Prime. Annual pricing is pretty reasonable for the cloud storage, but Prime members get unlimited photo storage as part of their membership! Those who just want to store stuff get 5GB for free and can upgrade to 100GB for $12 per year. If you really need more than that, they also offer 1TB of storage for $60 per year. If you need to store every film ever released, a 30TB option is available for $1,800 per year.  

Amazon Drive uses a “delta sync,” like DropBox. This means, when you upload a file and then upload a changed version of the same file, it only saves the changes. This means it just makes alterations to the file rather than redownloading the whole thing. This saves time and bandwidth! You can also elect to throttle upload speed if you need to balance what’s using bandwidth. Bottom line, if you’re already using Amazon Prime, this is a great choice. Otherwise, there are better options. 

NextCloud: If you don’t like the idea of Google or Microsoft or someone having access to your files, try NextCloud. You set up your own cloud storage through NextCloud, using your own server. While this might sound daunting to some, for tech-savvy users this is a great option. If you really want to exert total control over your cloud storage and backups, this is the way to go. The code is all open-source, so savvy users can run it all themseves. The service also offers private web messaging and conferences through NextCloud Talk and NextCloud Groupware. If you want to run a business and control everything from your own servers, this is the way to do it! 

OneDrive: Microsoft’s answer to cloud storage is a great platform. Windows users have access to it as just another computer directory! It’s quite easy to access and offers 5GB of storage free to anyone. Just like Google Drive works closely with Google Office Suite, OneDrive works with Microsoft Office. If you commonly use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and the like, OneDrive is a great option for you.  

If you have an Office 365 subscription, you get an extra terabyte of storage for OneDrive too! For businesses, there’s also OneDrive for Business that grants access to both storage and Microsoft Office. It’s just under $9 per person per month, which is actually a pretty good rate!  If you already use a lot of Microsoft’s Office Suite, OneDrive is for you! 

Most Generally Useful Cloud Storage: DropBox

DropBox is a very well-known cloud storage platform for good reason. It can be accessed from pretty much any platform and is quite easy to use. You get 2GB of free storage, as well as a few extra GB for syncing your phone to your DropBox. By recommending friends you can get extra storage, too. You can spend $10 per month for an extra TB of storage, or you can get it for $100 per year.  

The bottom line is that DropBox is easy and system-agnostic. It’s not married to any particular operating system or company. If you need a solid, dependable cloud storage platform that works on every device, DropBox is for you.