On Thursday, April 27th we looked at what to do when your Cloud storage fills up, focusing on paid upgrades and alternative storage providers.
Chris quickly ran through some of the services described on this site: Best Cloud Storage Services: Personal & Business Storage Providers in 2023: https://www.cloudwards.net/best-cloud-storage/ and we saw that among the important features was Zero Knowledge Encryption http://zero-knowledge encryption meaning that if there was a security breach or the authorities demanded access to your account, the intruder would only see scrambled data because you’re the only one holding the encryption key. Google encrypts files while they are being uploaded over the Internet but scans them before re-ecrypting them for storage…and we know Google thrives on collecting data from us! (Chris doesn’t care, but others may find that instrusive!)
We saw that most of these alternative cloud storage services offer some storage for free, some are specialised for file sharing, and others for media storage, while most offer extra goodies when you take out a paid plan.
We then looked at the paid plans for the major providers :
Apple iCloud https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238 . which gives you 5GB free: Monthly costs for extra storage were 50GB: 0.99 €; 200GB: 2.99 €; 2TB: 9.99 € plus extra features – the availability of which depend upon where you live in the world.
Microsoft OneDrive also has three paid plans: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onedrive/compare-onedrive-plans?activetab=tab:primaryr1 Basically, if you subscribe to Office 365 you get a storage upgrade over and above the free 5GB. Another way of looking at it is if you pay for more OneDrive storage you get the Microsoft Office suite and other tools thrown in. The 1TB storage plan with desktop MS Office costs $69.99 a year. It doesn’t have the Zero Knowledge Encryption described above, though it offers a secure folder locked by an extra level of two-factor authentication.
Google gives 15GB of free storage to store Gmail e-mails, Google photos and Google Drive. https://one.google.com/about/plans .Like the others, there are three paid plans (currently with a one month free trial). The middle one, “Standard” gives 200 GB storage for €2.99/month
You can analyse your existing Google storage and what is filling it up by looking at the Google One app in a browser while logged into your Google account. This provides a useful tool for clearing out junk. https://one.google.com/storage/management
Dropbox is the granddaddy of cloud storage and these days you get 2GB for free which you can use on three devices. You can get more storage by referring Dropbox to other potential users (Chris acquired an extra 5.2 GB that way!) https://www.dropbox.com/plans . It’s geared towards teamwork these days but the plan for individuals gives you 2TB storage of €9.99 per month, with 30-day file history (undelete stuff you deleted by mistake!) more devices and the ability to transfer large files.
JCC Members who had upgraded to paid plans, mostly for iCloud and OneDrive, had done so because their cloud storage had filled up resulting in scary messages. They could no longer manage files or e-mails.
We noted that in many cases, the cloud storage may have been set up to synchronise (backup) more folders (and possibly devices) than expected. In the case of OneDrive shown below, only the Documents folder has been synched.
One member asked if you could move data from one cloud storage to another – the answer is yes, and there are Cloud Storage apps to help e.g. Multcloud https://www.multcloud.com/product
There are many alternative Cloud storage services, most of which give some free space. Peter Br. uses TeamDrive https://teamdrive.com/en/startingpage which is based in Germany (Not based in the US like Apple, Google and Dropbox and Europe has stronger privacy laws than the US) with a 2GB free version for students. It is very secure with an integrated backup solution that protects data against loss or virus/ransomware attacks. Damaged files can be restored quickly and easily at any time thanks to backup and disaster recovery.
Scotty uses Proton https://proton.me/about Which is a Swiss-based, open-source, highly secure platform which puts privacy first. In addition to cloud storage, it provides encrypted mail, calendar and a VPN. There’s a free 1GB plan which includes these features. https://proton.me/pricing
Chris expressed an interest in Mega, https://mega.io/storage based in Australia which offers 20GB free (though with limited data transfers), although it has had some bad press! and also described the idea of having your personal cloud server in the form of a diskstation https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS220j though she had found it a bit of a faff to use in the past – perhaps it was worth looking at again as a local file server and backup storage at home…?
Chris Betterton-Jones – Knowledge Junkie