Cloud Storage, go for it?
Is storing most of your data on clouds (of which there are heaps of providers) suitable for you? If you want the full discussion on the pros and cons of Cloud storage, refer to this blog. I consider it timely (September 2020) to discuss here as to whether it’s worth to have your data stored on clouds. The more important reasons are that clouds are now quite affordable(e.g. Google One now offers 2TB for less than US$10/month, Microsoft 365 Personal offers less than US$7/month for 1TB, ….), and most families are now using/having acceptably fast unlimited internet data access (important as you would have to push/pull lots of data to and from your cloud servers). If you don’t have the latter environment, then cloud storage may not be suitable for you. Another good reason to use cloud storage is you may forget about your own data backups as the cloud service provider would do that for you (of course, you need to find a trustworthy provider!). I said ‘may’ because it is always advisable to still have some redundant personal backups (read my other blog post on Data Storage and Retrieval) for your important data- I have and I highly recommend that you have too or you have at least 2 independent cloud service providers. Also, with your data on the cloud, all your devices can have access to the same data anywhere in the world provided that there is the internet.
There are of course disadvantages of cloud storage, of which the more of concerns are privacy and reliability (do you trust your cloud service provider(s), and are your data really sensitive?
Cloud storage popularity has been growing and there are already many that comes with either your Operating systems (e.g. iCloud from Apple), or applications (e.g. Google Drive from Google/Android; One Drive from Microsoft, etc.). These are handy and attractive in terms of usage and seemless interface with the apps you’re using daily (if you’re using such apps and software). For example, I use ChromeOS and Android phone (as well as many Google software like Gmail, Google Photos,…), so my natural immediate solution would be Google Drive. And if you use MS Office a lot, the natural solution would be One Drive, similary, if you are in the Apply ecosystem, then iCloud would be your obvious choice.
However; apart from these, there are also heaps of independent providers like Dropbox, IDrive, Amazon Drive, Box, … – there are at least a dozen of such more popular cloud storage service providers. Some have been around for more than 10 years, e.g. Dropbox. All such service should provide data encryption, typically using 256-bit AES encryption, some allow for an optional user-defined key that must be shared with the provider (e.g. IDrive).
Which to choose from all of the above would depend on the reputation, costs, and reliability. This provides some comparisons amongst different providers. As most of these providers have initial free storage (e.g. 15Gb for Google Drive, 5GB for One Drive, 2GB for Dropbox, etc), it is advisable to join and utilize such free storage to try the service out first before committing. Of the above IDrive (which I have yet to try) is the more aggressive one, currently (Sept 2020) providing a 5TB plan at 90% off its usual price for the first year only. It also has a service (free within US, but chargeable e.g. for Australia, etc) called IDrive Express whereby they’d courier a 3TB hard disk drive to you for you to backup your data and courier it back to them (which makes much faster the initial backing up the many TB of data via the internet which might take weeks or even months). Subsequent backups or sync would be fine as the amount of data would be much less.
Apart from above, below are also important considerations:
- available app and software for your system to backup and sync your data to the cloud, although Windows, and Mac would be supported by all. But if you are using ChromeOS and only Android, then better check if their app is good enough for you as typically, the features are richest with Windows and Mac, and some features might not be available for Linux and ChromeOS. The basic backup with incremental backups and sync functions are essential.
- consider if you want multi-cloud transfer capabilities. This is important if you are switching providers or having redundant backups. Of course, you can download the data to your local computer and upload them to the other cloud, but this is tedious and time-consuming. Recent apps like Multcloud and Cloudsfer provide such cloud to cloud data transfer for the clouds they support. Note that not all clouds are supported, e.g. for some reason, the popular Google Drive is not currently supported by either of the above.
Credits and sources
Mister, M. (2020) 10 Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Storage, Promax.com. Available at: https://www.promax.com/blog/10-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-cloud-storage (Accessed: 6 September 2020).
6 best Cloud Storage Providers in 2020: List, Comparison, and Pricing (2020). Available at: https://wire19.com/best-cloud-storage-providers-comparison/ (Accessed: 6 September 2020).
