There's about 5 major players in the consumer cloud storage space; iCloud, Google, Dropbox, Onedrive, and Mega. By that I mean services which synchronise the documents/pictures/etc on your computer or phone with an online server somewhere, and optionally with other computers or phones. The advantage of those types of services are that they provide multiple redundancies - that is, it's very unlikely you'll lose your data on an online server, even if you lose it on your computer/phone. The disadvantage is that beyond a certain amount of data, they all come at a price, and at a cost to performance. Android and iPhone both have their own cloud backups built-in - Google Photos and iCloud, respectively - which synchronise the photos in your phone with an online server. Most android users don't realise their device is automatically backing up their photos by default, and get surprised when they get a message from Google saying that the storage space in their account is running low. They want you to pay for more, rather than bypassing that and synchronising photos directly with your computer.
Having said that, the 15gb of free online storage in your google account, which encompasses Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos and anything else google-related, is fairly generous. Onedrive only gives 5gb in their free account (and pulls the same scam as above, being enabled in Windows by default), while Dropbox gives a paltry 2gb. Personally I like Mega.nz who give 20gb in their free account. But once you start paying for storage, Mega is the most expensive per GB; followed by Dropbox, then Onedrive/Google Drive/iCloud all cost pretty much the same. If you have a Microsoft 365 license, you get 1tb of Onedrive storage with that also. And how do they compare in terms of performance? Each of these apps scan for changes to your data as your computer is running, which reduces speed a little. Mega has the smallest performance impact, with Onedrive next, iCloud following, then Dropbox, and Google Drive has the worst performance impact of any cloud service provider (source). Having more than one cloud storage system on your computer, like having more than one antivirus product, increases the performance hit, and can cause problems in some cases.
Lastly, there're usability issues: Onedrive and Google drive both store files/folders in their own proprietary format, rather than just as regular files on the hard drive. In a situation where you have to reinstall the operating system, you're often stuck with having to re-download all your data from the cloud service, rather than just copying data off the drive. This is fine unless you have large amounts of data. Finally, all of these services aside from Mega force you to store any data you want to be backed up in their own custom folder - rather than allowing you to simply define folders on your computer which you want to back up. Overall I recommend Mega for a free account, and for a paid one if you can afford it. For cheaper paid options, Onedrive on Windows and iCloud on Mac seem to have the fewest issues. Or you can do what I do for most of my data; just buy a large external drive and back up to it automatically. Aside from the initial outlay for the drive, there's no ongoing cost, and you don't have to deal with the internet or large multinational corporations to get access to your own documents.
- written by Matt Bentley