,In our last article, we went briefly over the history of storage, situations where you may not want to store things online, the option of an external hard drive, and Degoo.com, which offers 100GB free.
Google Drive: a Great Fremium Option
Many companies and people can benefit from using Google Drive if they are looking to share or store a medium amount of files. Google Drive is also great for sharing files, but only offers a moderate amount of storage space for personal users, 15GB. This can easily be upgraded for corporate users, however. $1.99/month for 100GB, $9.99 for 1TB, and $99 for 10TB. These prices have been recently reduced, so now is not a bad time to get a premium account. Google Drive also has a “sync” feature, in that any changes made to the files from any computer with access, shares those changes with all other computers with access. You can also download these files with the Google Drive program, so that any changes made online will automatically update on your computer. Perfect for offline access.
Dropbox: Better Deals for Large Storage
Dropbox is also similar in function, but offers less free storage and maxes out after a certain number of people have viewed your file. This would mainly be useful for smaller companies. But the reality is that you can buy 1TB for the price you would pay on Dropbox for 100GB. Dropbox does however have a feature similar to Google Drive’s program, making it decent for locally storing information. This also will distribute across your phone, iPad and computer, but the space makes it difficult for actually backing up information. It normally is fine for storing small amounts of corporate or school files, but there are better options for backups.
Mega: Distributing Large Files
If you are looking to distribute your files, the best way to go about it will depend on several factors. If you are looking to share them among a small group of people, Dropbox will work. But for mass sharing Mega.co.nz is best for large files of any kind, and github is best for any computer application sharing. Github does not offer a large amount of storage space, however. Beyond that, Google Drive is also decent for sharing with a large number of people, just not as good as Mega in many cases.
Mega offers 50GB free, making it one of the larger backup services. It does not have any kind of “sharing” features though, it is either public or private. This makes Mega great for backups and distribution, but not sharing them among a company. Many times in corporate situations, one will need to share certain files with everyone, making Mega not the best option. But for backing up, it is among the best in terms of space, and having no limits on allowing others to download what you upload. One noted disadvantage is that they throttle your bandwidth commonly.
Hopefully this starts you off on where to begin looking for places online to backup or store your files online.
