Been thinking about getting the new cheap online storage but wondered if it's a yearly/monthly cost. Cheers!
just to add, last time i looked i found skydrive to be the cheapest if you want to pay for a whole year in advanced
Currently OneDrive [Skydrive] - £64/year, £7.99/month for 200GB Dropbox - $499/year, $49.99/month for 500GB * Google Drive - $9.99/month for 1TB * [shared across GMail, Google Drive/Docs and Google+ Photos] *not including tax[es], so you may have to pay VAT or the like on top So Google is the cheapest of the 3 and offers the most space [the options go up to 30TB] Unless you desperately need the storage *now*, I'd wait and see if anyone else follows google and drops their prices... You also have stuff like Amazon S3 which is a bit more complicated price wise, you're charged so much per GB used + so much for how much/often you upload/download stuff... EDIT: Also worth considering if your upload speed is up to it... for me, it'd be more cost effective to buy a NAS and back up/store locally than wait the 2+ months it'd take to upload 1TB of stuff
I'd go Skydrive. Google Drive is terrible, It *thinks* everything is sync'd but in reality it's not. Once you put your data in, It's a pain in the arse to get back out again should you move else where.
FWIW, I also found Google Drive a complete ballache to use, and I personally use OneDrive because a I got 45GB for free [ish] and the Office integration... But from a pure cost/space pov, google is the cheapest/offers the most space
My experience comes from moving a business onto Google Apps because one employee loved Google. (Apparently he claimed to have invented IMAP) Anyway all sorts of issues happened where files would go missing, stuff would sync on some systems and not on other despite saying fully up to date. I had the task of moving it all back in house to a new file server. What a load of ball ache. Had to purchase a custom tool to download the files as Google splits all the data into chunks which also has copies of folders in. Eg. MY FOLDER - > My Doc.doc, My Doc2.doc PART1 - MY FOLDER > My Doc2.doc PART8 - MY FOLDER > MY Doc.doc So even with this tool it took a whole week before hand to bring 80gb of docs down because the sync is so pants.
Thanks for the tips guys...Worthy advice here. So which is the best to go with? My original plan was to use cloud storage to replace my HDDs at home and stream music online from my own storage (because Spotify doesn't have even half of what I actually listen to) and possibly videos and photos too. I liked the idea of getting Google storage because A) moving to Android (off Apple) B) got Gmail C) new prices are pretty cheap Essentially I just want a reliable Hard drive in the cloud that looks like a regular HDD to my PC @deathtaker, I'd probably F* the whole thing up and lose everything
Firstly none of them appear as a HDD to the computer, they all plonk a Directory in your User folder [or wherever you tell it to put the folder] and everything goes in there... For example - OneDrive goes to %userprofile%\Skydrive\, Dropbox to %userprofile%\Dropbox\ and Google Drive... goes nowhere because I rage quit and uninstalled it... To the best of my knowledge their respective 'droid apps are all relatively similar, iirc they all have the option to auto-upload photos, the ability to upload/download specific files to/from a specific folder and so on... Again, iirc, Android's equivalent of iCloud backups [*shudder*... bad memories] only works with google drive [likewise WP and OneDrive] If you're undecided, try them, see how you get on with each one using the free storage, that way you know which [if any] suits you best before committing any money... though in a purely self-serving way, if you sign up using either of the links below, we both get a bit [admittedly only 500MB iirc] of extra free space Dropbox, OneDrive [What was SkyDrive]
You can just use the subst command in Windows to map a drive to a folder, that way cloud services appear like a mapped network drive.
