You can take this to the bank; in the coming years, you will find yourself less and less in need of backing your data on hard disks or pen drives. It has already happened to some of us sooner than others, especially with the easily accessible free cloud storage given to us by Microsoft with its OneDrive, Google with its Google Drive and the freemium Dropbox storage.
All the above cloud storage are not suitable for heavy users with gigabits upon gigabits of data running up into terabits they need to store in the cloud. Sure OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox can allow you to save terabits of data, but you will have to pay a regular subscription fee.
However, let’s face it, not all of us have that extra disposable dollar to pay a cloud storage service provider. At the same time you cannot very well say you will just keep using the traditional hard disk to store your data; so you need to get innovative as I will explain below.
Cloud storage is just so much simpler to work with, it is easily accessible as long as you have a reliable Internet connection, and you can access your data with virtually any device; try reading the content of your hard disk on your Android phone!
I’ve compiled a short list of reliable cloud storage service providers that will host your data for free. This way, you get cloud storage without breaking your bank.
Free Cloud Storage Service Providers
SurDoc: They give you 100GB free storage and have been praised for their respect for privacy.
Hubic: They provide you storage to all types of files, and give you the Automatic folder synchronization option across all your computers. You can also share files and folders with other users by giving them links. Users have 25GB free usage, bigger than n that you will have to pay.
Data BaGG: With this, you get 5GB free storage. But you will have to download and install their application on your computer or mobile. Through this app, you will be able to upload your files to the Data BaGG servers.
Ccloud: They give you 10GB free cloud storage for the first three months. It can come in handy when you only need a cloud storage service on a temporary basis.
Just Cloud: This is a simple, fast and secure web application that lets you upload your document, photos, audio and video files. You only need to configure your account and voila, begin uploading your files to their cloud servers. You can then access your files from both desktop and mobile devices.
Zipcloud: Works like Just Cloud above where you can upload your files and be able to access them from any device.
You may have noticed, all the cloud storage service providers are giving free storage up to a certain file size. As I had mentioned above, you need to get innovative, say you have about one terabit of data you need to store online. No single cloud storage service provider will store that data for free, at least, not that I know of.
So for the really sensitive data, you can store them on providers in whom you have more trust. Say for your first 15GB, you can store them on OneDrive, your next 15GB on Google Drive, your next 2GB on Dropbox. In essence, you can distribute your data across all the cloud storage providers but only limiting yourself to using the free package from one provider then move to the next free package on the next provider.
