Alternative to Dropbox...

[Gary Compton]

I love Dropbox but because I'm as tight as a fish's backside, I begrudge upgrading the storage limit for £7.99 a month.

There seems to be many alternatives, is there any like Dropbox where you have the folder on your computers and just save to that which automatically stores it on the cloud?

 

[Venusian Broon]

How much storage does that get you Gary?

As I have a new windows 8.1 PC, MS are always trying to get me to use OneDrive, which is also built into the 'save as' part of office 2013 it seems - they are selling 1TB for £7.99 a month...which after looking at website looks identical to DropBox.

So not better then.

 

[Brian G Turner]

What is your current free limit?

 

[Gary Compton]

None, Brian. I have added Amazon cloud and box.com but was still short of what needed so paid the £7.99 for another month.

Any advice?

 

[Brian G Turner]

Depends on what your needs are - I use Google Drive:
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en

on the grounds that Google is very unlikely to be hacked (Dropbox has been previously hacked), plus Google are not known for deleting data or accounts, unlike Microsoft.

Plus you can set up multiple Google accounts to take advantage of the free storage. Previously, I had one for writing, one for website backups, and one for accounts.

 

[jastius]

Leisha put up a link somewhere that if you touch it and sign up both her and you get extra Dropbox space. Perhaps you could do the same, Gary? Maybe someone knows how?
I don't have the memory on this tablet to synch it to Dropbox. There are other things available as well
Google drive says its free for uploading.
Zoho is a free word processing app, and accounting app. They give you a free cloud account as well.
Ever notes says it will synch across platforms as well... Not a good note taking app, but it does a decent synching job.
Microsoft again has its own platform.
Gary have you thought of maybe transferring some of that volume of files into a self email?
Email now has à lot of memory.
The other thing you can do is get an external storage device, say three or four T.. Then have your computer set to be automatically backing your files up. Remember that any storage device attached to your computer is remotely searchable through your computer to call up files and so on. So you can search from another device..

 

[Pwaa]

Google Drive works in the same way. how much storage are you looking for exactly? Why can't you just buy a USB memory stick?

 

[Faisal Shamas]

Google Docs has versioning, I find that very good, but it depends on whether you trust google. Major companies are making their money selling data

 

[Pwaa]

Google Docs has versioning, I find that very good, but it depends on whether you trust google. Major companies are making their money selling data

Could say the exact same about any cloud storage system. But out of the millions and millions of profiles, I can't imagine for one moment that anyone is looking through for someone's stories to steal.

 

[Dan Jones]

You can do various tasks I think with Dropbox to get hold of extra bits of storage; like Facebook, add extra details on your account, that sory of thing, to get extra space. I'm up to 30Gb - more than plenty for my works in progress and the odd photo

 

[prizzley]

I've used Google Docs for a few years and it's worked for me. However, recently it's been misbehaving. Documents supposedly saved to Google Docs from my tablet have disappeared completely and others have failed to sync. Closing and reopening Google Drive hasn't solved the problem. Neither has tearing my hair out. I've started emailing each document to myself!

 

[TØny Hine]

I had a similar problem with Google Drive and I found it was because I was using illegal characters in the file names.
Just thought it worth mentioning...

 

[prizzley]

I had a similar problem with Google Drive and I found it was because I was using illegal characters in the file names.
Just thought it worth mentioning...

Thanks, but I don't think it can the that. I'd been working on the docs for days. The earlier versions synced to gdrive, but the syncing seemed to stop suddenly. Still, I'll try renaming the docs and see what happens.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

So called Cloud services are evil. Esp. Google. Dropbox OTH seem merely lacking in competence.

There is no openness or transparency about QOS, privacy, backups or security. They are only safe for short term not terribly private real time collaboration.

 

[Nick B]

SpiderOak is about as secure as you can get for cloud based storage. Why? Because A- it encrypts at source ie your pc. Even the staff at SO can not read your data. And B- it is open source so you can be reasonably sure there are no back doors allowing access to your files.

The downside? Pricing is on par with Dropbox and if you forget your password, the data is pretty much irretrievable because SO do not keep your security details either.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

f you forget your password, the data is pretty much irretrievable because SO do not keep your security details either

As it should be.
I used an address book kept in safe place and never with laptop when travelling.