Do I really need three cloud services?
QI am awfully confused. I seem to have Onedrive, icloud and BT Cloud. Do I really need all three of these? I have a Windows 7 laptop and an external USB hard drive that I use for backups. I also have an Apple ipad Mini running IOS 8.2, and a Windows Phone. The Windows Phone seems to send photos to these cloud services. I find it all so hard to understand. Is it sensible to keep them all, or should I just have one? How do I get rid of them?
Marilyn Teal
ANone of these services is essential, and you probably don’t need all three – but it depends on if or how you use them.
Onedrive ( www.onedrive.com) is Microsoft’s cloud service and comes pre-installed on the latest Windows Phone devices. It’s likely that the complementary Windows app was installed on your PC when setting up your phone, even if you didn’t realise – and it’s now syncing stuff with your phone.
Apple’s offering is icloud ( www.icloud.com) and, while it’s certainly useful for your ipad as a place to save files off the device, having the Windows version installed is useful only if you like to keep your PC’S photos and Outlook emails, calendar and contacts synced. We have a feeling you don’t do that.
BT Cloud ( www.btcloud.bt.com) is online storage that’s included with various broadband packages from BT, and you get 5GB or 50GB depending on your deal. It’s the least intrusive of the three and free storage is always useful but again, it sounds to us that you have little need or indeed desire for it.
In all these cases, you should be able to uninstall these tools with little or no impact on how you use your PC, though if you remove Onedrive you’ll obviously lose the photo synchronisation – but it sounds like this is annoying you anyway. So, click Start followed by Control Panel, then the ‘Uninstall a program’ link under Programs. Now scroll through the list to find the first unwanted service, click to highlight it then click Uninstall at the top and follow the prompts. Do the same for one or both of the remaining two services, then restart your PC.