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DISCOVERAPP SHOWDOWN: THE BEST CLOUD STORAGE APP[ LONELY AS A CLOUD ]App
showdown:
The best
cloud
storage app
THERE ARE MORE THAN A
FEW FEASIBLE ALTERNATIVES
TO DROPBOX, YOU KNOW.
[ JOEL BURGESS ]Google Drive
IT’S TIME TO DRIVE SOME CHANGE IN THE CLOUD STORAGE SPACE.
15 GB Free | http://www.google.com/pricingDROPBOX IS BASICALLY a dinosaur in
the tech world, and though it has done
a great job keeping its features up to date
and convenient, it’s built enough of a
reputation to push users into paid
subscriptions before almost all of its
competitors. If you don’t need enough
online storage to warrant signing up for
a paid subscription (which, to be honest,
is most users), then you’ll probably want
a little more space than the 2GB Dropbox
offers for free. There are a number of well
known and easy-to-use alternatives that’ll
allow you to more than double your space
for no extra cost and the best part is that
you can still use your Dropbox for the
important or just the smallest files.
Google Drive is generally considered
to be more of a document creation and
management suite, but with 15GB of free
storage space and the ability to upload
anything from videos to AutoCad sketches,
it’s hands-down the most generous cloud
storage application as well.
Between the smartphone apps and
web interface portals, Google Drive iscompatible with an extremely broad range
of platforms. Not only can you load it up
to your iOS or Android, it also lets you
import items from an abundance of sources
including: Box, Dropbox, One Drive,
Google Photos, locally stored files and even
a handful of popular note-taking, local
photo capture and image management
applications. The number of import sources,
puts Google Drive on par with the best
offerings available and since it also offers
the same straightforward file management
system, we can’t see why you would prefer
anything else. It isn’t the fastest cloud file
transfer we’ve tested, taking about
2 minutes and 40 seconds to upload
a large 52.5MB video file on a 100Mbps
upload Wi-Fi connection, but for a free
service, this is pretty exceptional.
The feature that makes Google Drive
the best online document manager is a big
factor in why it is also one of the best cloud
storage solutions. Sharing is a simple task
in Google Drive requiring only an email
address to share files with. If the recipient
happens to be on Gmail, you basically havea secure sharing platform, but there is
enough flexibility in the link sharing
system to allow you to share with outsiders,
via a cut-and-paste HTML links, as well.
That said, you’re able to get more technical
when sharing between Google accounts,
setting files as either editable, commentable
or view only.
Because it is naturally built to tie in with
the broader Google ecosystem, you also get
kickbacks like being able to save Gmail
attachments directly to your personal cloud,
scan documents directly to the cloud with
your smartphone, draw on Google’s
powerful search algorithms, sync up with
Google Photos (where you get unlimited
smartphone photo backup storage for
capped image and video files) and run
the suite natively on any Chromebook.
If 15GB isn’t enough, then Google Drive
even has some of the most competitively
priced subscriptions as well, letting you bag
a 100GB for $2.49 per month ($24.99 per
year) or $12.49 per month ($124.99 per year)
for a whole terabyte of cloud storage space.