My interest in music led me to investigate the Amazon Cloud Player and I ended up purchasing 20 gigabytes of storage (5 is free) so that I could upload part of my music collection (the digitized music that is not protected). The initial goal was to use the cloud player to access this music from my various computers and some devices (not including those that use Flash).
The 20 gigabytes for $20 a year seemed reasonable and the storage could be used for whatever I wanted to store off site. As I collect more content – images, video, pictures and the documents I write, off site storage becomes more and more important.
I decided to investigate some online storage options in order to compare price and features. I decided I needed to narrow the field so I am excluding personal off site backup options such as pogoplug or one computer backup plans such as Carbonite. I am focusing on online storage capacity I can use from multiple machines.
Amazon – so the Amazon site I have already describes is pretty much a buck a gigabyte deal. However, the Amazon option is about more than pure storage as it is both a cloud drive and a cloud player for your music.
DropBox – Dropbox is a great product that allows both local access and online access. I pretty much think of it as a universal harddrive connected simultaneously to all of my machines (I have DropBox installed on multiple machines). You can purchase storage beyond the free basic level, but as much as I use the product and would pay to continue to use it, the pure cost for storage is too high.
SugarSync – another product I use to backup files among multiple machines that I own, but somewhat like DropBox more expensive than alternatives for pure storage.
Google – good old Google. You may not think of Google as an online storage option, but Google docs was expanded to accept pretty much any digital format and the rate for gigabytes past the free level makes it the most cost effective option.
So, each option has unique features and it is important to consider what value you might place on a given feature. For pure storage, Google would be my present choice.
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