With life going along madly, needs have a tendency to change, as mine have recently done which has put me in the market
for some cloud storage accessible to all the different devices and operating systems I use. The fact that I use Gmail
automatically put Google Docs out of the running, I am hoarding my space there and don't want to use it for the docs I have
in mind.
So what's left? I knew of some and went to research others. There's
the ubiquitous DropBox, but with only 2 GB of free storage,
I knew I could find better for the money. And for my purposes, free
is the currency I seek. So on to other providers. Now I
am not talking online backup, I need usable documents through any web
browser, so storage is the keyword. I noticed that Amazon
is offering 5 GB free storage, and thought it might suit. But what
else? So I took to Google. While not being the provider for
me, it could still help me find my quarry. I located and read
several articles written by people who had detailed and compared
the available options. While their needs differed from mine, I still
found the information useful and it saved me hours poring
over the options and possibly finding much later that the seemingly
correct choice would not work for some key reason. I strongly
considered SugarSync, again a 5 GB account free. It would surely
work, but being the data hoarder that I am, I kept reading.
And where do you think the storage winner came from? Haha, surprised
me, Microsoft!! And as time goes forward I see some evidence
that this particular option, SkyDrive, will become even easier to
use. It is being worked into Windows 8 and is already connectible
through Office 2010, and therefore through Windows 7 making it
accessible through Windows Explorer. How easy can it get? Well, this
doesn't hold true through Mac OSX or in Android or iOS, but even
there it can be accessed through a web brower, Firefox, Safari,
Dolphin, take your pick. And while there isn't a clear winner across
the board, I do like this option.
And then today, what do I read in my feed but that yet another even
larger option exists, albeit temporarily. Box, a provider with
an Android app, is offering a whopping 50 GB free for life for all
who sign up before March 23. Now if you want some sort of sync
capacity, this isn't your best option, but for simple cloud storage,
count me in! Now I can already hear those of you who think
like I do, "What about security?" Cloud services have excellent security, and for the basic information I seek to
store, there is no risk to me even in the unlikely event that the files are compromised.
Naturally, I don't wish it, but there's nothing personal in any of this
data. I doubt seriously that I even scratch the surface of these
capacities, but knowing that keeps me from scrimping. Save it, by
all means!!
