To the cloud, file storage service! That certainly seems to be the
mantra as of late. And the competition amongst companies who provide
such services is definitely heating up. Dropbox, a popular choice for
quite some
So, with three – soon four – major players all competing with one
another, who should you go with? Before I state my pick, here’s a
rundown of what each service has to offer.
Dropbox
Dropbox is a pretty notorious cloud startup known for its ease-of-use
and functionality. While only offering 2GB of storage space, Dropbox is
the most cross-platform cloud service of the bunch – it has clients for
Windows, OS X, and Linux, as well as iOS (iPad and iPhone), Android,
and even Blackberry – and it makes collaboration quite simple. It also
has a good set of file recovering features; a one-month history of your
work is kept, you can undo changes to files and even undelete them.
Finally, there’s also Dropbox Teams, which allows you to get 1,000GB
or more storage for a more costly rate. Helpful for businesses
especially who have need for such cloud storage and collaboration tools.
SkyDrive
SkyDrive has been around for quite some time now, and while it bested
Dropbox in free storage space – offering 25GB – it lacked in features.
Until today at least; Microsoft has just pushed out a pretty major
update to the cloud storage service. Now, SkyDrive desktop clients have
been released for Windows and OS X, and the existing iOS and Windows
Phone SkyDrive apps have received an update as well. You can even
remotely browse and snag the files on your PC quickly and securely from
anywhere in the world that you have an Internet connection.
Now, as Microsoft determined that most SkyDrive users only require
7GB or less of storage, they have actually knocked down the amount of
free storage from 25GB to 7GB, unless you’re an older user of the
service, then you can keep your 25GB for free. Nevertheless, 7GB is
still 3.5x more than the storage offered by Dropbox. If you do need
additional storage, however, it is cheaper than Dropbox. To get 100GB of
storage on Dropbox, it will cost you $199 a year (or $19.99 a month).
SkyDrive, on the other hand, charges only $50 a year. Enough said.
iCloud
If you’re an Apple user, then using iCloud is definitely a
no-brainer. It allows you to seamlessly backup your iOS devices to the
cloud and sync photos and documents across all devices. And, coming with
5GB of free storage to boot, with a 50GB storage upgrade – which bumps
your total storage capacity to 55GB – available for $100, you can
definitely obtain legroom if needed. However, iCloud offers far more
features tailored towards Apple users (@me.com email address, Find My
iPhone/Mac) than features for cloud storage if that makes sense, so I’d
use it along with another service such as Dropbox or SkyDrive.
Google Drive
Now, this particular service is still rumored, so thus, nothing
officially has been revealed. But I did want to touch on it to make
everyone aware that it’s in the pipeline and likely will be released
very soon. All that rumors have suggested so far is that it will offer
5GB of storage for free (still more than Dropbox), and will tie in
nicely with Google’s ecosystem. I think that tying this in with Android
phones as far as file syncing and backup would be awesome, to provide
users with iCloud-like functionality.
So, what should you select? For most of you, I think SkyDrive is
awesome. Their pricing is hard to beat, and most of the functionality
that anyone will need has been added in the latest update. However, they
still lack an Android client, and probably never will have a BlackBerry
client. If you are a user of either, and require access to the cloud
service of your choice on the device, you’ll have to go with Dropbox.
I’m sure that for Android users, Google is also cooking up a good
solution with Google Drive.
But, if you want unbeatably priced storage with good functionality
behind it, and are situated with either Microsoft or Apple
ecosystem-wise, SkyDrive is my top pick. I’m not ruling out iCloud, of
course; I think you should use it as well. But, as far as cross-platform
file storage and syncing is concerned, SkyDrive is unbeatable. I
suggest using both services, if you’re an Apple user like me.
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