Free cloud storage recommendations?

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johnny8977

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Anyone use any of the free providers? There seems to be a few that offer 50gb free.

Anyone any preferences?
 
Ask yourself, what is it you want it for?

If its anything remotely critical then you need some sort of contract and SLA agreement with ink on paper, which probably to be anything like enforcable needs money to change hands.
 
If you don't value your data, then I suppose any provider will do.
 
I use both Dropbox and The Box.

I prefer The Box as I can share photos when selling stuff on here.

The Personal account offers 5Gb for free and sometimes there are offers to get it up to 50Gb (I have that).

Cheers
Carl.
 
I only use Dropbox as a lazy wireless way to move something from my laptop to my iPad

Other than that I keep getting reminders in my inbox to move to Cloud as MobileMe is ending
 
Mmmmmmm.......I signed up with one of the cloud storage companies a year or two ago.

I needed more than the minimum free storage that they offered, so opted to pay for more, and then I started to back up my photo files from my hard drives. It was giving me messages about how much had been backed up and how long it would take to do the rest. All sounded good.

After a week it was still telling me that it would take me more than three years to finish the job - and during this time I hadn't switched my PC off.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is to be selective and be patient.

In my case couple of two terabyte drives solved my problem for a while, and I cancelled the contract.
 
Spug said:
Mmmmmmm.......I signed up with one of the cloud storage companies a year or two ago.

I needed more than the minimum free storage that they offered, so opted to pay for more, and then I started to back up my photo files from my hard drives. It was giving me messages about how much had been backed up and how long it would take to do the rest. All sounded good.

After a week it was still telling me that it would take me more than three years to finish the job - and during this time I hadn't switched my PC off.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is to be selective and be patient.

In my case couple of two terabyte drives solved my problem for a while, and I cancelled the contract.
Click to expand...

In my experience you can upload approx 1 to 2 gb per day with these services, so a large photo library is not a good candidate for cloud storage. Mine's only a little over 100gb, so at the limits of sensible use already.
 
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desantnik said:
Because "cloud" is sexy. Really sexy. :cuckoo:
Click to expand...

Because if the house burns down, those spare HHD's are going to be no good, are they?

I have Time Machine on my Mac so I'm pretty much sorted for physical backups, but since I have many photos of my children's first this that and the other, I would really like something whereby if everything in the house did go up in flames, I wouldn't lose anything.

And I though if I'm uploading some much, I may as well upload everything. Thanks to those who suggested something, I'll have a butchers.
 
I use minus, it's relatively new but when I signed up offered 15gb of free storage which could be increased upto 50gb, 1gb for each referral. I'm currently on 33gb :thumbs:

If you fancy checking it out feel free to use my referral link: http://min.us/rQkYV5W

I have all my stuff backed up on HDD's too but it's nice to have some of the more important shots backed up online just incase of a fire :)
 
johnny8977 said:
Because if the house burns down, those spare HHD's are going to be no good, are they?
Click to expand...

That's why mine are in my drawer at work several miles away. I looked at cloud backup and came to the conclusion it wasn't for me as it was too slow to back up initially and kind of expensive compared to HDD.

I already had the HDD(s) just needed to grab a few cheap USB caddies (£5 each). The only down side is I have to manually do the backup and transfer, it's not automagic like the cloud.
 
Cloud isn't terribly practical for home users with slow uploading ADSL and ridiculous monthly transfer limits.... well, not unless you are someone who shoots only a handful of shots.

As I said earlier in this thread, you also have to question whether or not the provider you choose will actually still be there in the long run too. Several have gone bust with zero warning and others have been shutdown by the US government because other users content was deemed illegal (see the whole megaupload case, but this is only a fraction of the problem...).

Personally, a backup copy stored in the desk at work or round your mother/friend/local pub is a better bet.

Get at least 2 removable disks, swap them over each time you make a backup.
 
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