Lock in your 25GB free cloud storage

TYMBI. There's a limited time to claim 25GB of space on MS's Skydrive. -p.

Lock in your 25GB free cloud storage

This week has brought some changes in the retail cloud storage scene. Google has come out with its Google Drive, offering 5GB of free space, and Microsoft has revamped the terms of its Skydrive facility.

MS used to give away 25GB of free space. That sounds nice, but the problem was there was a file size limit of only 50 MB, if I remember correctly. Happily, that problem has been taken care of, for if you install the Skydrive desktop program, for some reason the size limit lunges up to 2GB – which is a pretty big file.

Take note, however, that along with MS’s revamping, the new free allotment is only 7 GB of space. This means that all new accounts will be that smaller size, and older accounts will be reduced to it too, unless the old 25GB limit is reclaimed within a certain period of time.

So basically, if you have an existing Skydrive account, you need to get over to live.com and reclaim that higher limit. And do it soon, or you’ll lose it.

And now a note on the services. To really condense this down to a few sentences, the Google and MS services are good, but Google is accessible only via the Web interface, and that means no syncing. MS hits a lot of the right buttons, but you will find that its sync program is extremely basic.

That brings us to the Dropbox/Sugarsync consideration. Dropbox is an excellent service, and if you can benefit by all the third party plugins that extend its functionality, it may well be your choice. But if you want a better desktop engine, and more built-in functionality (indeed there is a bit of a learning curve), and if 5GB free sounds a lot better to you than 2GB, then Sugarsync is a better choice over Dropbox.

And let me add that if you use this promo link, you will get an extra .5GB for free from Sugarsync.

What I’m going to do is use both Sugarsync and Skydrive. Sugarsync will be for my daily syncing needs, and I will use Skydrive for deep storage, since it’s desktop interface is virtually devoid of options. I think that’s the best of both worlds, and the extra 25GB from Skydrive is like having your own small hard disk in the cloud.

And there is no reason you can’t set up local encryption with any of these services (save Google, which doesn’t sync at all). See my two articles here for how to do this.

Well the cloud storage war is certainly building to a frenzy and no doubt there will be a few losers as a result. Cloud storage is great for mobile users but if you are static I say just use local storage, unless you have a good reason for using a cloud service to store data. Even backups of files should be kept locally if possible on an external USB drive or NAS device, especially if the content is of a sensitive/private nature.

I personally would never keep anything private on a cloud service because i truly fear for its integrity over a long period. Having said this, cloud storage is good for sharing things like pictures, config files and other non-sensitve data.

Just read this FAQ about Google Drive - Google Drive FAQ - Communications - News - ZDNet Australia

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"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
/* Dennis M Ritchie 1941 - 2011 */

Yes, this is heating up. I like sugarsync because it syncs my data across any number of machines. Cloud storage is also more efficient for sharing large files, since sending by email adds 33% to file sizes due to encoding. The other benefit is that off-site storage adds a layer of protection against fire or theft. And I encrypt everything locally, so I don't think the privacy thing is a problem.

Quite true, this is a good advantage against a disaster of those sorts. The ISP's really need to step up to the mark here in regards speed and data caps for cloud usage. Luckily my ISP has doubled my data quote for the month to 120GB but we only have a speed of 3.5mbps up and 750kbps down, so any significant backup will take quite a while to complete.

__________________

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
/* Dennis M Ritchie 1941 - 2011 */

I think I have 10M down and 2 up, here on cable in the US. But still the limiting speed factor has always been the cloud servers, at least for my free accounts. On the good side, I believe they all use block copy, which more or less reduces the amount of uploading to only those portions of files that have changed, once the file is up.