One of the best things about cloud storage is that you can save your data on an Internet server somewhere and access it from anywhere in the world. Though the recent shutdown of Megaupload which has caused a lot of people to lose their legitimate files has become a cause of concern for many people but the fact remains that cloud storage is slowly becoming an important way to store our files on the Internet. It is much more convenient to share an online folder containing a few GBs of data than to set up an ftp server which is at times insecure.
There are lots of free and premium cloud storage services available to meet the needs of different people and businesses. Services like Dropbox, iCloud and Ubuntu One are just some of the services that allow you to synchronize and share your data on multiple devices.
Dropbox is definitely the most popular cloud service out there because of the size limits for free usage, Ubuntu One is popular with Linux users but is slowly getting popular with Windows users and it too provides a reasonable amount of free storage. Apple’s iCloud is also slowly gaining popularity and could soon overthrow Dropbox from the top spot.There are several other cloud storage services like Rapidshare and Media Fire that let you share files online, but these services could soon shut shop because of their legality issues as anti-piracy campaigners complain that they help users share copyrighted music and games by providing links that users can share with others.
If you are considering using a cloud storage solution then you should definitely consider doing some research online about the various services as there are still issues with the upload tools on many of these services. Ubuntu One for example has a lot of issues to deal with on its client application, though it provides a decent 2GB of free data usage, the Ubuntu One client that lets you share data is very buggy and has caused users like me to lose data. Similar problems have been reported on other services as well.
For many users like myself the free usage subscriptions are just enough to get the job done, but if you are a power user and constantly need to share and receive huge volumes of data, the premium subscriptions on the cloud storage services are very reasonable. Some subscriptions are monthly while others are annual and the prices range from anything between $10-$40 for a 10GB usage limit depending on the time-length of the subscription.
The best thing about these services is that there are Android and iPhone clients of these services that you can use to access or share data from your phones and tablets. But a word of caution, synchronizing your data on cloud drives means deleting your data on your phone or computer would automatically delete the files from the cloud drive, so be careful on what you synchronize on your cloud drives or else you could lose some very precious data like I have.
If you need to use the cloud for personal use then you are in luck because many companies offer 5 GB and more of free cloud backup space. Read More about these Cloud Storage Companies at my Blog.
