Paid cloud storage.....what are your opinions, guys?
Afternoon, gang.
Well, I've finally "taken the plunge", as it were.
Long-term members will be aware that I have, for some years, been juggling several free cloud storage accounts in order to provide Puppy community access to all the stuff I put together for Puppians. This has included a Google Drive a/c, a MediaFire a/c, a MEGA.nz a/c, and more recently, a pCloud a/c and one called SukuDrive (which purports to offer 75 GB free storage, but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one! MEGA initially offered up to 100 GB, but that rapidly dropped away to just 20 GB...)
The trouble with all these 'free' cloud storage options is that you can never be sure if, as & when you'll lose access to everything.
Google are currently offering a month's free trial for their paid storage tiers, along with extremely reasonable monthly (or yearly) subscription rates thereafter. I've had this Google a/c since 1999, so that means it's now 25 years I've been with them. For many years, I did nothing with the a/c (initially opened to provide an email a/c for stuff I was doing at the time, and indeed, GMail was the only component I used for ages).
I've been mulling this over for quite a while now, and eventually came to the conclusion that a paid storage option would guarantee continued access to my stuff for the community. Accordingly, I now have a "Google One" a/c, which currently gives me 102 GB of storage. (That extra 2 GB came to me the very year I joined the Puppy community, in 2014.....on the 15th anniversary of opening the a/c. Google said it was a "long-service" reward for having been with them so long..!)
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Now; I know many folks are rabidly anti-Google, but to be fair, in all those years they have never messed me around once, in any way at all. They've been as good as gold over odd cock-ups, and have gone out of their way to put things right ASAP.....plus, I make copious use of their app infrastructure, and I'll give them their due, everything just 'works' together seamlessly, and has made my life a lot easier in many ways over time.
You can't sneeze at £1.59 a month for 100GB of guaranteed storage. In the new year, I may explore their annual payment option, which for this particular tier works out to just £1.08 per month when paid in advance (around 25p a week).
That's NOT bad, all things considered! So; over the next few months, I shall gradually be migrating everything to a single location.....although it IS going to mean a lot of broken links for a while. For which I apologise in advance. You HAVE been warned...
What do you guys think about this kind of thing? Do any of you employ paid cloud storage.....and if so, are you happy with it?
Mike.