“It went up! It went up to the cloud!”
“And you can’t get it down from the cloud?”
“Nobody understands the cloud! It’s a mystery!”
For those of you who haven’t seen the trailer, that’s a panic-stricken conversation between Cameron Diaz and Jason Segal from the movie Sex Tape . The last sentence there isn’t exactly true; some of us, I’m sure, do understand how the cloud works. Simply put, one can store a good amount of data across devices in a (most often) single logical pool, a virtual cloud if you will, that lets one access the data from anywhere. Most of our smartphones come equipped with native cloud storage apps, such as the Google Drive for Android, iCloud for iPhones, and OneDrive (previously SkyDrive ) for Windows. Here are a few other apps that do a great job of storing your data in the mysterious cloud.
Dropbox
Of all the cloud storage apps, Dropbox is my clear favourite. Even today, it remains the best online cloud storage option, offering a wide range of cross-platform support — Android, Mac OSX, Windows, iOS, even Linux and Blackberry. Once you install Dropbox , whichever file — photo, video, audio — stored in your account will be available on all your devices, not to mention the Dropbox website as well. One little peeve that most users of Dropbox have is that it offers only 2 GB of free storage.
Box
Box works as most other cloud storage solutions do and has been around longer than Dropbox. The great part is that it offers 10 GB of free storage, with the catch being that a file size cannot be greater than 250MB. In this day and age, with people used to shooting long videos in HD, that’s a bit of a sticky issue.
Of course, if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you get more benefits — file size limit increases to 5 GB, storage space to 100 GB and so on. My favourite feature is that you can link MS Office to Box so that all Office files get automatically saved into the cloud.
Zipcloud
One of the fastest ways to sync and access data, Zipcloud is like most storage solutions — but on steroids. You can back up and sync your files immediately, and the best part? It offers you free unlimited storage.
BitTorrent Sync
BitTorrent Sync does not use the mysterious cloud. Instead, it uses peer-to-peer file sharing and syncs data between your devices.
The only requirement is that all your devices be online at the same time as there is no central cloud server to sync data to the devices later. Therefore, the data now exists only on the devices you wish it to be stored in.
