By Stefan de Klerk for moneysmart
What would you do if your laptop were stolen or your hard drive crashed and all your beloved photos, videos and important documents were wiped out, never to be found again?
Backing your files up on an external hard drive could have prevented this scenario, but that too can crash or be stolen. And besides that, external hard drives tend to be on the more expensive side.
So what would be the best way to avoid this unfortunate situation? Store your files online, or as is more popularly known nowadays “œin the cloud“.
Online (cloud) storage options are increasingly becoming the storage solution of choice for most of us. The best part of online cloud storage is that there are many free options available, each offering a good amount of free storage space.
But with at least 6 excellent free cloud storage options available, how can you tell which one offers the best deal?
To investigate, the moneysmart Community compared some of the most popular and well-known cloud storage solutions.
The following options were looked at: Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive and Syncplicity (Personal Edition).
Take a look at the results of the comparison in the infographic above or the table below:
* Requires ownership of an Apple device, yet does not sync all files and no folder syncing. IT is more focused on syncing files you access through apple software, e.g. music purchased from iStore, iWork Files, Calendar and Contacts. If you own an Apple device, it is a great product, however you might need another solution to help you back up all your files.
** You can get more space the following ways: 3GB by using the mobile app to upload photos, 125MB for completing Getting Started Guide, 125MB each for linking to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, 125MB by telling Dropbox why you love them. There are additionally a few more tasks you can complete to increase your space for free.
*** Your 15GB free storage is shared between your Gmail, Google Drive and Google+ accounts. With regards to media stored on Google+ only those over 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos longer than 15 minutes count towards your storage limit.
moneysmart tip: As some of these storage options work with only specific devices, before making any decision, it‘s best to first see which devices are supported by the cloud storage option you‘re interested in.
