Too Many Clouds

March 06, 2015

Recently 3 gigabytes of bonus space I had in my Dropbox expired and I found myself over my Dropbox storage limit. Dropbox decided that this was a good time to offer me a discount to try and convert me to a paying customer. Many people would probably convert at this point because they use Dropbox not just to share files but also as a backup service. However I already use Backblaze to backup my computer. Backblaze does about eighty percent of what I need. I can access files on my iOS device, get previous versions from the website, and have a full backup of my entire hard drive. I just use Dropbox to share files and for shared folders.

Unfortunately, in addition to Dropbox, I have multiple other cloud service providers. iCloud gives me 5GB to store my stuff. Google Drive has 15GB of storage that it offers. Amazon and Google both offer cloud music players that I do not use with storage options. I have a free Box.net account I think with 50GB that I have not yet even tried. Meanwhile Adobe Creative Cloud gives me some free storage and Flickr wants to be my photo backup solution along with Google Plus. The sheer volume of cloud storage solutions is enough to quickly become confusing.

In an ideal world I would like Apple to purchase Dropbox and then I would pay them for their suite of services. Mailbox is my favorite mail application by far. It is convenient to see when someone updates a file from the Dropbox app. Furthermore being able to generate share links directly from my desktop is super useful. However I am running up against storage limits in both Dropbox and iCloud. The idea of paying multiple cloud service providers is not at all appealing. So I am on the hunt for alternatives. Suggestions and ideas are welcome in the comments.

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This work by Matt Zagaja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.