But it has the stingiest free-storage offer - just 2 gigabytes - and is relatively costly, charging $99 for a 100-gigabytes plan. Dropbox also can be set to automatically import photos from cameras or smartphones. You also can create shared folders to which you can give access to others. You can share individual files via links you can email or post online that will bring up the file in a browser. This service from a small company, Dropbox Inc., is the best known, and simplest, of the bunch. For simplicity, I compared their annual fees for a 100-gigabyte account, more than enough for most average folks.Įach of the contenders claims to be secure and requires a password, but, like everything on the Internet, there is no way to be absolutely certain their security is impregnable. Each offers a teaser amount of free storage online for these files and then charges for storing more, at various amounts. All the services work on both Windows and Mac and on both Apple and Android-powered mobile devices. So the files are both backed up in multiple places and synced. If a file saved to the special folder is changed in one place, that change is replicated everywhere else. Any file you place in that folder is synchronized with a similar special folder on any other computer where you’ve installed the program, as well as with a virtual hard disk stored on a remote server that’s accessible via a Web browser or a mobile app. They establish a special folder on your computer and install a small program to monitor that folder. Most of these services work in basically the same way. There are many smaller, less well known, alternatives not discussed here.ĭropbox is the best known and simplest of the main online-storage services I also chose to omit Apple’s iCloud service, because its document storage feature only works today with a few Apple-built apps and only on Apple products. I omitted one big player, Box, because it is primarily aimed at businesses, while these columns are written for average consumers. I chose to look at four of the best-known services aimed primarily at consumers: Dropbox, SugarSync, Microsoft SkyDrive and Google Drive. ![]() Overall, this type of service is useful for anyone with many computers and devices, either for personal or group use. I compared their main features and costs. Instead, my aim here is just to explain the category and highlight some of the key competitors. And I didn’t do an in-depth review of them. I didn’t try to pick a winner, since they all worked fine for me. This week, I took a look at some of the leading online file storage and sharing services. In Silicon Valley, this is considered one form of the big trend called cloud computing. Some even go beyond file storage to include built-in editing and collaboration tools that live on remote servers instead of on devices. A number of services are battling it out to act as trusted online repositories for important documents that can be accessed on all your computers and devices, and shared with others.
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