The UK’s Zoolz charges £5.49 a month (paid annually) for 500GB or £9.99 a month for a 1TB Family Plus plan, intended to back up 15 computers for up to five users. Canada’s Sync charges $49 a year for 500GB and $96 a year for 2TB. Kim Dotcom’s New Zealand-based Mega charges £8.91 a month for 1TB. Less familiar suppliers are sometimes but not always cheaper. Microsoft OneDrive only goes up to 50GB for storage, at £1.99 a month, but you get 1TB with Office 365 Personal for £5.99 a month or £59.99 a year. Apple’s iCloud is relatively cheap at £6.99 a month for 2TB. It’s better.Īmazon Drive costs £79.99 a year for 1TB and £159.98 a year for 2TB. Google One, as it’s now called, charges £7.99 a month for 2TB, which drops to an annual fee of £79.99 a year. It’s still competitive with other leading services that usually don’t store 30 days of revisions or let you easily undo a file deletion. However, it also doubled the storage allowance to 2TB, which used to cost about $200 (£158) a year, and it has added some extra features. Photograph: Reuters Photographer/Reutersĭropbox has increased its starting price to £95.88 a year, which is £7.99 a month if paid annually. Google offers a variety of cloud services, including Google Drive and Photos. If you are not in that position, keep paying Dropbox until you are. You should have local copies and backups of everything, so that you can walk away and just let Dropbox close your account. Having only one copy of their data in one online pot is a gamble that many people will lose. Some could lose data when The Big One hits California. Some people lost data when Megaupload’s servers were seized by the FBI. Some people lose data when services change their terms, like Flickr, or go bust, like Streamload. People lose data every day because they forget and can’t recover passwords, their accounts are hacked, or their service provider has a hardware malfunction or makes a mistake. And if your data only exists in one online storage pot, then you have no backup and your data is at risk. In a better world, you would be able to move 500GB of data from one service to any other in a few seconds, without downloading it and re-uploading it.
Online storage services are like lobster pots: it’s easy to get into them but hard to get out. Millions of people shared their photos on Flickr, and billions share reduced-quality versions on social networking services such as Facebook and Instagram.Ī fourth reason might be that you have no way to keep a local backup. The second – very sensible – reason might be that you want an off-site backup where your data will be safe if you’re burgled, your house burns down, or there is some other catastrophe.Ī third reason might be that you are sharing your photos and (less likely) data with friends and family, or possibly with the public. The first and best reason is that you often need access to the same data from multiple devices, some of which you use while away from home. You could buy a 4TB external hard drive for less than £90. The core question, of course, is why you need to store 500GB of stuff online in the first place.
0 kommentar(er)
