Cloud Storage Can Keep You Organized and Up To Date

January 24, 2017

You’re sitting in a meeting with a potential client. They seem interested by your services, but they’re not quite convinced. Back and forth you go for tens of minutes before you decide to show them your full hand to convince them, the presentation of your portfolio that you prepared for hours, specifically catered to them. You pat your pockets as you set up your laptop, only to realize….wait, where is your flash drive? A cold sweat breaks out as your eyes glower a distant gaze, your mind drifting into the hazy memory of it sitting on the counter top beside that pack of gum. You feel your pocket again, and somehow you doubt that pack of Trident Layers is going to win them over.

Welcome back to #TechTuesday! This week we want to introduce you to three of our favorite cloud storage services, and how they can benefit you more than a few pieces of sugarless gum!

Where you need it, When you need it

Cloud storage is hardly a new technology, but it has quickly become an extremely invaluable service in the last few years. Before you ask, no it does not mean we store those important spreadsheets beside the rain. Cloud storage refers to the storage of your data on online offered, remote servers. These servers are secured with multiple layers of protection, then reside behind account based partitions. The data provided by these services are often able to be accessed on multiple remote devices, to keep your data accessible anywhere.

So, the question is…what service do we use? Well, lets break that down into three of the major brands offered.

Dropbox.com

One of the biggest names in cloud storage right now goes by the name of Dropbox. Sporting a full website suite, as well as applications for Windows, Android and Apple iOS, Dropbox is one of the most well connected services offered in our list. It offers features such as access via web browser on any device, direct link file sharing and exporting, and mutli-device synchronization. The last is a fantastic tool for keeping the most recent versions of your files up to date across all of your devices, so long as they have been connected to the web long enough to update the catalogue. This service also has an added benefit on its mobile applications of offering an automatic upload of any pictures you’ve taken with your mobile device, a fantastic feature for saving some space on the smaller storage drives of a smart phone.

Free accounts begin with a measly but useful 2GB of free storage, granted to you with nothing more than a registration to the website. However, this can be increased to as much as 16GB of storage free of charge by linking your social media accounts, and referring friends to join the service. Dropbox also periodically has been known to increase storage for free as a promotional gift to its users. However, for $8.25 a month you can increase your storage instantly to 1TB with Dropbox Pro.

Dropbox Business also allows users to collaborate on work, giving each person unlimited space in a personal Dropbox account. Along with features such as file recovery and file versioning, the suite goes far more in depth than their basic packages. Business pricing starts at about $12.50 per user per month, with a requirement of at least 3 users to begin. These packages do extent into an enterprise level storage with network control, advanced training for users, and more that can be found by contacting Dropbox directly.

(www.Dropbox.com)

Google Drive

For owners and fans of the Android platform, any proprietary software by Google seems like a natural choice. It’s integrated, it’s backed by the manufacturer of your operating system, and well….it’s Google. Rarely do they seem to put out something that doesn’t hold its weight well on any platform.

Google Drive comes with a pretty competitive, hard to pass up set of features. For free, you start at a very generous 15GB of storage space. You gain access to the Google Photos companion app to store high definition photos on your mobile phone, as well as access to Google’s series of office programs, the G Suite. This includes web and app based programs for Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, and Sites. All of this just for the -free- account, which mind you is automatically entitled to you when you sign up for a G-Mail account. For 1.99 a month, this storage is then upgraded to a more generous offering of 100GB, or for $9.99 a month it increases even further to 1TB a month. Just like Dropbox, this service is multi-platform as well, with the only downsides being the web interface is kind of clunky and hard to navigate at first. However, it does offer the same desktop based applications that allow constant synchronization, and drag and drop file uploads that are offered by Dropbox.

(www.Google.com/Drive)

Microsoft OneDrive

With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft has decided to overhaul their online storage platform, and introduce it as an integrated part of their operating system. Needing no additional software or application, as it is a direct part of your Windows 10 system, OneDrive is an easily convenient choice for any users of the most recent Windows operating system. They do offer a Photos app that can sync pictures across all devices, including Android and iOS, as well as Mac desktop PCs.

OneDrive starts you with 5GB free just for having a Microsoft account. This gives you access to the full suite of OneDrive applications, the web based interface, and the constant synchronization that comes with it all. For $1.99 a month, you can upgrade that to a slightly larger size of about 50GB. Progressing forward, Microsoft is one of the more unique offerings on our list, offering two more plans by the names of Office 365 Personal at $6.99/month ($69.99/yr) and Office 365 Home $9.99/month ($99.99/yr). These plans allow you access to 1TB of storage space, all of the full suite of Office 2016 applications for any of your devices, Sharing up to 200GB per day of files, and the ability to scan long documents with the OneDrive mobile app into a single, shareable PDF. The only difference in the two price points is that Office 365 Home extends its feature set to 5 users, where as Personal is restricted to a single one. However, it does not say that they must be in one household, so that price could easily be divided between a few.

So Many Choices

As always, we do have our preference in services, but that does not necessarily mean we are the most right above everyone else. This is our expert opinion, and we hope that it helps you make an educated decision of your own based on it all. Of course, there are other services out there that offer similar or even better deals as well, so look around! With cloud storage, the sky is no longer the limit, just a boundary waiting to be broken.

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