For certain reasons I needed to find a good and free online storage provider. At first I wasn't thinking too much about synchronization possibilities of such a provider since I wasn't in a need for one, but as it will later come up, now it seems like it is a good idea to keep an eye for this feature as well while evaluating all the options. My first concern whenever I think of any online service is just one - SECURITY. This term is also including several other terms like PRIVACY and ENCRYPTION, and each of those also include some very important facts I'll get back to later, when the time will come for it. I don't share nor spread around any data anyone could find very useful, but even such data is important only to me, I want to keep thinking of myself as a VIP and therefore keep off all the prying eyes away from my data.
I think you get the point so I won't go any deeper and I'll just state what I do care about the most and how are they ranked on my internal scale of importance:
- Data encryption - any data leaving your local computer/storage should be encrypted before it actually leaves anywhere. I'll get back to it later in more detail, motivated by some rumors which turned to be true regarding some providers still being able to decrypt stored user's data, which is or at least should be very bad thing at least for a normal security aware user.
- Secure connection - it is always a good idea to insist on secure HTTP or HTTPS connections between your local computer/storage and online storage provider, even your data is encrypted prior to leaving your local computer/storage.
- Amount of online storage space which provider is willing to give for free - the more they give the merrier you should be.
- Transfer limits - obviously you and I can't get just about all for free, therefore some online storage providers came with an idea of limiting maximum file size you can upload, number of simultaneous uploads and finally monthly bandwidth you have as a free user. Some very "nasty" limits are mentioned here, and to make things more "interesting" for us free users, online storage providers often like to combine more than one of them at the same time. So I'll do my best to filter all the online storage providers which don't have some or all of the mentioned limitations on free accounts (at least didn't have them in the moment I was writing this).
- Transfer management process - how easy (convenient) is way of sending/receiving/syncing data. By this I mean if you can access your shared storage directly form Windows Explorer, can/need to use some kind of storage provider's specific desktop manager (and level of it's operating system integration) or are you left to struggle with pure web browser (maybe Java, not that it's bad) oriented management tool.
- Decent connection speed - it is very likely that you will never ever even come close to provider's transfer peek speed, but still since I'm talking about free storage plans very often some providers do limit data transfer speeds for free accounts.
Just out of curiosity, I will mention two more online storage services so called "Social Storage" I've came across in my Internet wandering and which are a bit different than previously mentioned ones. The main difference is they are based on concept of users (which are always online I hope) sharing their spare free storage space and in return getting more or less the same (service dependent) amount of online storage space. If you feel keen for this type of concept, have spare free space on your local storage media and quality 24/7 internet connection feel free to try Onemo or Symform. There are some concerns related to this kind of storage concept primary regarding varying users quality (speed) of Internet connections. Another issue might be regarding data reliability (redundancy) which I hold for a minor or non existent issue since my guess is this kind of service is more like data block based (data dispersion) along with certain level of encryption rather then one user holding all of the data from another user. My personal attitude is not to like this kind of concept, but you're for sure invited not to share my point of view and to try it out. One is for sure - this way you'll get way more storage space than on any other existent storage service.
Since I've started to write this blog post some time but never actually got to publish it I'll do it now. One of the reasons why I decided to wait is the fact a lot of services entered the scene my thinking was pretty simple - what goes up must come down. In other words I've decided to wait and see which services will become popular and which will disappear and which will pop up on the scene after the standards have been set. And I think I've made a good decision as you still should very seriously take into consideration above mentioned fact to look for. So this post will remain strictly informative while you can check out this post and see which free cloud services I like.
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