Lately, we’ve been having some laptop issues (boo!) – it happens to us all, but unlike the good bad old days when if you’d forgotten to back up, tough luck, there are lots of ways these days that you can keep your work remotely in “the cloud” and not have to think about backing up (too much, at least!)
Dropbox is probably the most popular cloud storage on this list but surprisingly has one of the least generous storage plans available. Nevertheless, it is still a really useful site to use, because it’s easy to share documents, many applications use Dropbox to sync files (meaning it’s nice and easy to edit files on your desktop that you edited on your phone) and you can earn additional free space quite quickly. (Here’s our affiliate link – if you sign up through this link, then we will both get a little extra free space, woo hoo!)
Free: 2gb, but you can earn more free space with referrals and performing certain tasks (syncing your camera pictures to Dropbox when you plug it into your computer can earn you up to 4gb, for example). The lowest level of paid storage is 100gb for $10/month.
Box.com
Box has iPhone and Android apps available, and usually has special offers where you can get 50gb of storage free.
Free: 10gb, lowest level of paid storage is 100gb for £3.50/month.
Google Drive
You probably already have a Google Drive account if you’re a Blogger or Gmail user. You get 15gb free for storage but this is shared between your Google accounts for certain items. If you do end up needing more space, it’s one of the cheaper options for the amount of space that you get.
Free: 15gb (which is shared between your Gmail, Google Drive and images on Google+ larger than 2048 x 2048 pixels), lowest level of paid storage is 100gb for $2/month
iCloud
iPhone users will already be using their iCloud storage for backups most likely, but you can store documents in there as well if needed. It’s cheap, but you don’t get a huge amount of space for the money, and you’re more likely to use the space up for iOS backups, iTunes Match and Photo Stream uploads.
Free: 5gb, lowest level of paid storage is 10gb for £14/year
Amazon Cloud Drive
A relative newcomer to the list, Amazon have now started offering their customers storage space. If you’re an Amazon customer (and who isn’t?), then you automatically receive 5gb of space. It’s super cheap to upgrade (£6 for a year!) but you don’t get a huge amount for that space (relatively speaking – 20gb is still a pretty sizeable amount!)
Free: 5gb, lowest level of paid storage is 20gb for £6/year
The above services all have various mobile and desktop apps available to make saving files to them easily. If you install the desktop plugins, then it will make the cloud storage appear in your document lists like any other folder – this makes it super easy to keep files saved.
The below table compares the prices of the above services on a yearly basis – hopefully this makes it a little easier to figure out what is the best value for you!
| £/month | £/year | |||
| Dropbox | 100gb | $10/month | £6.20 | £61.49 |
| Box.com | 100gb | £3.50/month | £3.50 | £42.00 |
| Google Drive | 100gb | $2/month | £1.20 | £14.42 |
| iCloud | 10gb | £14/year | £14.00 | £14.00 |
| Amazon | 20gb | £6/year | £6.00 | £6.00 |
Do you use any alternatives to these?
