Free your cloud

Here at APC, we wouldn’t describe ourselves as cheapskates, but you’re more likely to find our Managing Director sprinting off home at the end of a working day, rather than risk the chance he has to pick up a bar tab.

There is certainly a number of free cloud services that we recommend you could consider for backing up specific types of files, which offer a useful offsite alternative and other services. However, if data is truly precious to you, we strongly recommend you consider paying for a suitable service — if a product is free, then you’re the product.

To kick things off, Google Photos offers unlimited free photo storage when you opt to use its ‘compressed’ service. Google has done a ton of advanced research into image compression, and you’re not likely to spot any difference. It also offers free 1080p video storage for clips under 30 minutes. It’s suppose to tie in with Android device usage. A solid alternative is Flickr, now owned by the non-hacked SmugMug, rather than Yahoo, and you get 1TB of storage, which is not to be sniffed at.

Spinning back to Google, Google Play Music offers storage for 50,000 tracks for free, if you’re happy to be annoyed by promos to pick up its paid-for unlimited service now and again. It supports MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, Ogg and ALAC, and individual tracks can be up to 300MB in size. There’s a desktop uploader tool, which can churn away, uploading in the background.

For straight storage, the go-to free service tends to be Mega.nz, which provides 50GB of free storage via its pretty slick desktop and mobile systems. You then have a host of services such as Box, pCloud, and MediaFire, which offer around 10GB for free, with paid-for options on top, alongside what Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive have to offer.