App showdown: Cloud storage
THERE ARE MORE THAN A FEW FEASIBLE ALTERNATIVES TO DROPBOX, YOU KNOW.
DROPBOX IS BASICALLY a dinosaur in the tech world, and though it has done a great job keeping its features up to date and convenient, it’s built enough of a reputation to push users into paid subscriptions before almost all of its competitors. If you don’t need enough online storage to warrant signing up for a paid subscription (which, to be honest, is most users), then you’ll probably want a little more space than the 2GB Dropbox offers for free. There are a number of well known and easy-to-use alternatives that’ll allow you to more than double your space for no extra cost and the best part is that you can still use your Dropbox for the important or just the smallest files.
Google Drive is generally considered to be more of a document creation and management suite, but with 15GB of free storage space and the ability to upload anything from videos to AutoCad sketches, it’s hands-down the most generous cloud storage application as well.
Between the smartphone apps and web interface portals, Google Drive is compatible with an extremely broad range of platforms. Not only can you load it up to your iOS or Android, it also lets you import items from an abundance of sources including: Box, Dropbox, One Drive, Google Photos, locally stored files and even a handful of popular note-taking, local photo capture and image management applications. The number of import sources, puts Google Drive on par with the best offerings available and since it also offers the same straightforward file management system, we can’t see why you would prefer anything else. It isn’t the fastest cloud file transfer we’ve tested, taking about 2 minutes and 40 seconds to upload a large 52.5MB video file on a 100Mbps upload Wi-Fi connection, but for a free service, this is pretty exceptional.
The feature that makes Google Drive the best online document manager is a big factor in why it is also one of the best cloud storage solutions. Sharing is a simple task in Google Drive requiring only an email address to share files with. If the recipient happens to be on Gmail, you basically have a secure sharing platform, but there is enough flexibility in the link sharing system to allow you to share with outsiders, via a cut-and-paste HTML links, as well. That said, you’re able to get more technical when sharing between Google accounts, setting files as either editable, commentable or view only.
Because it is naturally built to tie in with the broader Google ecosystem, you also get kickbacks like being able to save Gmail attachments directly to your personal cloud, scan documents directly to the cloud with your smartphone, draw on Google’s powerful search algorithms, sync up with Google Photos (where you get unlimited smartphone photo backup storage for capped image and video files) and run the suite natively on any Chromebook.
If 15GB isn’t enough, then Google Drive even has some of the most competitively priced subscriptions as well, letting you bag a 100GB for $2.49 per month ($24.99 per year) or $12.49 per month ($124.99 per year) for a whole terabyte of cloud storage space.