Storage prices have fallen considerably over recent years, yet Apple is STILL charging nearly 10 TIMES the amount to upgrade storage in practically anything which, when you have a growing collection of treasured family memories, media library and backups - can be a bit of a problem.
So in many cases, the options are, 1, pay for extra storage, which in Apple’s case, is so overpriced it’s an absolute SCAM. 2. add external storage with SSD’s. Or 3. cloud storage.
I actually have a follow up post coming soon on an SSD’s Buyers Guide, but for this post we are just going to focus on Cloud Storage.
From the obvious names like Google, Apple and Microsoft, to some names you might never have heard of before, but actually, could be a better option, depending on your needs, I'll be taking you through some options.
And hopefully, we’ll help you decide where is best to spend your hard earned money.
Getting Started
One of the first decisions you’ll need to make, is how much storage you need and how much you will pay.
As far as the competition goes, they are broadly similar with all of the usual names. For those who need a LOT of storage, the ones that offer the most are Google at 30TB of Google Drive and iDrive with 100TB.
But there are some workarounds to this. Many providers such as Google, Microsoft, and Dropbox can offer vastly more than this, and Sync even provides unlimited cloud storage - BUT, on the proviso that you sign up for their business plans, which then involves paying for a minimum number of users.
And whilst it may be an affordable way of purchasing cloud storage, particularly with Sync’s Unlimited offering, for the purpose of this post we’re just going to stick with Personal plans, without getting into the intricacies of setting up and managing multiple users on business accounts.
And also, lots of these come with other benefits like Google One, Microsoft 365, Apple iCloud - but again, we're just focusing on Storage here.
Google: 15TB Free / 100GB £1.59 / £7.99 2TB / 5TB £19.99 / 30TB £119.99Microsoft: 5GB Free / 100GB £1.99 / £14.48 2TB / £59.99 11TB
Apple: 5GB Free / 50GB 0.99 / £8.99 2TB / £54.99 12TB
Dropbox: 2GB Free / £7.99 2TB / £16.59 3TB / Business Plans for more
Sync.com No Free / $5 200Gb / $8 2TB / 6TB $20 (Billed Annually) / Unlimited Business Plans
iDrive 10GB Free / 100GB $0.24 / 5TB $5.80 (Annual plan) / 100TB $83.29 (Annual Plan) - 5TB $4.98 per YEAR. (First Year)
Box 10GB Free (250Mb File Limit) / 100GB £8 (5GB File Limit)
Proton Drive: 5Gb Free / 200Gb £4.09 / 1TB £16.29
Other notable plans here are that Google also offers the most FREE file storage at 15Gb, with iDrive and Box coming in at 10Gb. Although Box adds some pretty significant file size limits of 250Mb per file, which, depending on what you are storing, might cause you some issues.
And iDrive has a VERY, VERY strong offer of 5TB for just $5.98 per YEAR, for the first YEAR only, which then goes up to $5.80 per month.
Privacy
Next up - let’s talk about Privacy and Security.
Privacy first - which is very top of mind right now, after Apple recently announced they are removing the Advanced Data Protection feature for UK Users, because the Government told them so…
So one thing that you may, or may not know, is that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, and Box all don’t use End to End Encryption. Which means, that if they so chose to, they can access your data.
Now to be clear, this isn’t an every day thing. This is when police or government have the correct warrants for them to do so.
But not everybody likes having their stuff that, whilst it’s unlikely will ever be accessed by someone else, is still accessible.
The only companies to offer this for consumers are Apple, excluding the UK, Sync, Proton, and iDrive. So if your privacy is of utmost importance to you, then you should stick with one of these services.
The other services either don’t offer this, or reserve this feature for their teams, business and enterprise subscription tiers.
Security
So following on from Privacy, security across the board is pretty similar regardless of which service you go for. As you can imagine, they are all constantly protecting themselves from all sorts of malicious activity from those trying to hack into peoples accounts.
But linking this to what I’ve just mentioned around privacy, this is another reason why End to End Encryption is so useful, because even if a service does get breached. Your data is still safe, because even the providers themselves can’t access your data.
With that said, outside of individual people being targeted with phishing attacks which just trick them into giving away their usernames and passwords, there have been no wide reports of the likes of Google or Microsoft, or any of them, being hacked to the point that suddenly all of your private files and folders are being sold online.
Outside of this, all of the providers have their data in redundant datacenter locations, so if the location your data is being stored has a natural disaster, you can be safe in the knowledge that it will be replicated to another location, and thus keeping your data safe, and accessible.
Backup
One area that many people forget about though, are backups.
Because storing your data online, in the cloud, otherwise known as ‘Someone else's computer’ doesn’t mean that is it safe from accidents. Accidents like deleting files, or even entire folders full of your data, and then not realising until weeks, sometimes months later.
Now, many of these cloud services will provide something called retention. Which is where if you delete a file, then you have a certain amount of time where you can get it back again.
For most places, that’s 30 days. But there are some exceptions.
Sync is a whopping 180 or 365 Days depending on the plan.
And Proton, also can be configured for many, many years on their paid plans.
Microsoft: 30 Days
Dropbox: 30 days
Box 30 Days
Apple: 30 Days
Proton: Up to 200 Versions over 10 Years
But that’s not everything, because 30 days isn’t really that long. Like, what if you deleted a folder you thought you didn’t need, and then realised a couple of months later, you did need it?
That’s where a proper Backup comes in. And this is where it can get quite tricky, because pretty much all the cloud backup services are geared towards business accounts. So backing up a personal account then relies on you manually taking extra copies of your data and backing up to external SSD’s, or a NAS, or another different cloud storage provider. If you know of any, maybe let me know down in the comments below and I’ll check those out.
Which service should you use?
But ultimately, the service you use will depend on the type of data and the devices you are accessing that data from.
Best for iPhone Users
For iPhone Users and to some extent, Apple users, iCloud is by far the most convenient. It’s just built in to everything at the Operating System level. And features such as backing up your iPhone just happen automatically without you worrying about it.
When you want to upload a photo to social media, you can scroll through all of your photos ONLY if they’re stored in Apple Photos.
If it’s in something like Google Photos then you have to go find the photo in Google Photos first, then download it to your device, THEN go upload it and choose the one that’s just been saved to your Apple Photos.
Best for Mac Users
If you are an iPhone and a Mac user, then you may want to consider one of the other options.
Personally, I’m using a combination of Google Drive and Apple’s iCloud and that works really well. Although it does mean I’m paying TWO subscription costs per month when I’d really rather not.
I also have Advanced Data Protection enabled on my iCloud account, so that data is secure and I’m going to keep it on until Apple pry it from my cold, iPhone holding hands.
Best for Samsung/Pixel/Android Users
If you’re an Android user, then depending on your flavour of Android, you might be better off looking at OneDrive or Google Drive since many Android phones are tightly integrated with one of these two cloud services.
Best for Windows Users
If you’re a Windows user, then you are pretty free to basically choose any of them!
Best Unlimited Storage
For unlimited storage then there is really only one option, Sync.com, even though that is a business plan. You can technically get unlimited storage with others like Google Drive, but you’ll basically end up subscribing to a tonne of user licenses to increase your storage each time, which can get very expensive.
Cheapest
For the cheapest it is no doubt iDrive, because of that insane First Year price, but also they are overall just the cheapest even after that first year promotional pricing.
Best Private
And for the best private cloud storage - this is a difficult one. Apple is actually up there, if you exclude the UK because of the Advanced Data Protection.
Otherwise I’d probably go with Sync, and then Proton just because that’s more expensive.
So I hope that helped - let me know your thoughts below and make sure you’re subscribed to the newsletter to learn more about buying the right SSD, which is coming very soon.
Until next time.
