If you have a pile of stuff to store, abundant free options online
You may be hearing lots about Google Drive, an online storage service that has been rumored to be coming for more than six years. The Drive arrived Tuesday, offering 5 gigabytes of free storage, integration with the popular Google Docs service and powerful search features that can scan text inside images.
It also arrived with a couple drawbacks: no ability to edit Google Docs in your Drive when you’re offline and no application for your iphone or ipad, to name two.
The good news is that anybody with an Internet connection has access to tons of free storage. Not enough to replace your hard drive, perhaps, but certainly enough to store loads of photos, documents and even some videos. Here are some of the big players:
Dropbox
Storage size offered: 2 gigabytes for free.
Platforms: Windows, Mac, Web, IOS, Android, BlackBerry
Nifty trick: You can get 500 megabytes of additional free storage for each person you refer to Dropbox, up to 18 GB (This was easier before Dropbox had 50 million users).
Random fact: Dropbox founder Drew Houston listed Google Drive as a possible competitor to Dropbox in his original application to Y Combinator, more than five years before Google Drive arrived.
Apple’s icloud
Storage size: 5 GB for free, but content purchased from Apple (such as music and TV shows) don’t count against your limit.
Platforms: Mac, Windows, Web, IOS.
Nifty trick: The service includes Photo Stream, which allows you to store the last 30 days of photos taken with your IOS device or imported from a camera to your Mac or Windows computer, and automatically pushes them to each of your icloud devices.
Random fact: Icloud was the last service to be introduced onstage by Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who resigned two months later amid worsening health. Microsoft’s Skydrive Storage size: 7 GB for free. Platforms: Windows, Mac, Web, IOS, Windows Phone.
Nifty trick: If you’re collaborating on a Microsoft Office document in Skydrive, it will track changes for you.
Random fact: Dropbox’s Houston has derided competitors things, enable creation of Web-based documents and sharing of photographs.
“Drive is something we intend to be at the center of our users’ online experience,” Pichai said. “We see this as a primary place for people to go to create and collaborate and live in the cloud across devices and across applications and have their important data available to them seamlessly.”
Users can put a Google Drive folder on multiple computers, including for putting together complicated feature checklists that compare various services using a series of difficult-tounderstand metrics. With that in mind, check out Skydrive’s feature checklist at sfg.ly/ J7DMCT. Box Storage size: 5 GB for free. Platforms: Windows, Mac, Web, IOS, Android, BlackBerry.
Nifty trick: The site runs frequent promotions that give you enormous amounts of free storage in exchange for installing its mobile app. Last year, anyone who installed Box on an IOS device got 50 GB of free storage on Box for life. This year, Box ran a similar promotion for Android users.
Random fact: Box is actually the oldest of these services, having launched in 2005 as a consumer platform. While the company has shifted its focus to large and medium-size businesses, it tries to make its storage platform attractive to mainstream consumers as a way of attracting customers to its enterprise offering. those that run on Windows, Macintosh or Android programs. Any document, photo or other file that is dragged onto the folder becomes accessible from almost anywhere, such as from an Android phone or tablet. Google says compatibility with Apple’s iphone will be added to the service soon.
Once a file is stored, the files can be shared with others or discussed online. In addition, Google Drive is open to third-party applications so users can create, open and share files from a variety of other software programs.
Google intends to make stored files easily searchable. Users can search by using a keyword, as when they use the search engine. The word could be anything from the title of the file to a term in the text of a scanned newspaper article.