Fast Company published this review here which should provide some food for thought in your decision making process. One suggestion to point out from the article is not to be afraid to obviously try different services but to also use multiple services depending upon your needs.
Via Fast Company
Cost per year
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| Amazon Cloud Drive | Dropbox | Google Drive | iCloud | SkyDrive | |
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| Free amount | 5 GB (plus 20 GB with music purchase) | 5 GB (expandable to 18 GB) | 5 GB | 5 GB | 7 GB (or 25 GB for existing users) |
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| 10 GB | $20 | ||||
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| 20 GB | $20 | $29.88 | $40 | $10 (for those without free 25GB upgrade) | |
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| 50 GB | $50 | $99 | $100 | $25 | |
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| 100 GB | $100 | $199 | $59.88 | $50 |
For a more full accounting of what every notable cloud storage company offers, and for how much per gigabyte, check out Ars Technica’s perfect chart.
The hidden talents of each service
iCloud, well, it does something very specific for Mac and iOS owners (and technically Windows iTunes users, but that’s just untenable). But each of these services does something more than you might know.
Dropbox: That huge range of 5 GB to 16 GB for free accounts? You don’t need to convince 28 friends to sign up for Dropbox at 500 GB each. You can often get that valuable extra space for the price of a cheap-ish sandwich using Google AdWords, among other tactics.
The simplicity of Dropbox lies in its “magic folder” nature, but if you want to sync other folders, like your documents or certain projects, or even your Desktop as a whole, it’s not that tricky. Grab MacDropAny (Mac) or Dropbox Folder Sync (Windows), then point, click, and rest easy.
It’s also worth noting that Dropbox has the simplest file-sharing method around: it’s just a link, which anybody, Dropbox or not, can use to view and download your files.
Google Drive: Want to send files to Google Drive without having to drag-and-drop to the Drive folder? Try a handy right-click trick that makes its a two-step process to offload any folder in Windows over to Google’s cloud.
SkyDrive: Beyond the big free space and cheap paid space, SkyDrive has one killer feature, especially if you’re using mostly Windows systems: “Fetch.” That is, if you forget to sync something up to your SkyDrive from one system, then land on the other system to find it missing, you can remotely access your other computer and grab that file.
Amazon Cloud Drive: On its own, Cloud Drive is just a website where you can upload files, and then later download them. With third-party tools like Gladinet or GoodSync, you can use Cloud Drive in the same “magic folder” style as its competition.
It’s also worth noting that once you pay the minimum 20 GB of Cloud Drive space, Amazon offers to host an unlimited amount of your music for free. That’s a major calculation for some folks, especially given that you can then play that music in any browser, anywhere.
iCloud: iCloud is not like the others, in that it’s very specifically an Apple service meant to automatically sync specific things: contacts, photos, apps, documents, music, calendars, and the like. But designer John Marstall found at least one way to use iCloud photos a bit more freely than Apple design. His Photo Stream hack for Macs lets you quickly pull out any photo from your stream for easy grabbing.
Which service do you choose?
It’s truly going to depend on your needs, but more so, the needs of your data. Me, I’ve split my online storage across three services: photos on Google Drive (because Google+ and Picasa also have nice-looking, easy-to-share web albums), music on Amazon MP3 (because $20 for unlimited MP3 storage is more than reasonable), and Dropbox for things I’m working on (because it has clients for every system and phone and tablet around). But that works out only because my wife and I mostly shoot photos with our phones, I don’t mind adding my music album by album, and most of my work involves writing tiny text files or working in Google Docs.
Don’t be afraid to split your backup across services, but also make sure you know how you’re going to get your data out once you’ve got your data up in each company’s cloud.
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