Hey, You, Get Onto My Cloud
By Wayne Maruna

    Hard drives are components that live inside your computer case and store all your programs and data.  The cost of hard drive storage has gotten remarkably inexpensive, especially for the familiar mechanical drives. Super fast solid state drives (SSDs) still command a premium, but their costs too are falling.  So with drive storage so cheap, how can we explain the growing popularity of on-line storage? Why are people trusting their music, pictures, and documents to some server farm situated in God knows where – ‘the cloud’ in current parlance?

    There are several reasons for using cloud storage. Some people prefer to trust copies of their important or favorite files to ‘the cloud’ to guard against data loss. Others (myself included) find that by keeping certain key files in accessible cloud storage, they can access the latest version of a file regardless of which machine they are accessing it from.  Others use the cloud to supplement their limited smart phone or tablet storage, particularly for music, pulling down files wirelessly to their device on demand. Collaboration and file sharing are additional reasons to use on-line storage.

    There’s no shortage of companies willing to give you free ‘cloud’ space.  With the roll-out of Windows 10, Microsoft is pushing hard to get users to sign up for their free OneDrive storage space.  Everyone who signs up gets 5GB of free storage space.  (This is a reduction from the previous free allowance of 15GB.  If you currently have signed up and gotten 15GB, you need to take action to keep from seeing your allowance curtailed.  Go here before 1/31/16: https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus/ )

    You can get an amazing amount of free online storage if you’re willing to sign up with multiple providers.  I mentioned the 5GB of free OneDrive space from Microsoft.  If you sign up for Microsoft’s Office 365, which is a $100/year rental of their Office suite, they will throw in a full terabyte of OneDrive space.  How much is a terabyte of space?  It is somewhat difficult to quantify in a meaningful way because of all the possible factors, but for example I generally record my MP3 music files at the highest quality level, which takes the most space, and the 23,000 songs in my music collection consume 108GB of space.  There are 1,000 Gigabytes in a terabyte, so a terabyte would hold roughly 213,000 songs.  

    If 5GB is not enough space, you can sign up for a Google account if you don’t already have one through Gmail, and Google will also give you 15GB of space on your own personal Google Drive account. If that’s still not enough, you can buy 100GB of added space for $2 per month.  A terabyte of space will cost $10 per month, which sort of makes the Office 365 price tolerable when you consider the included cloud space, provided you can make use of it.  When I bought my Asus Chromebox which runs Google’s Chrome operating system, Google threw in 100GB of cloud space free for two years.

    I use Google Drive for collaboration.  I provide volunteer tech support for Merci Clinic, and I have two other fellows who occasionally help me.  Between us, we try to keep 30+ computers up to date.  I have a maintenance checklist in a file on my Google Drive, and I gave the other guys access to that file on my drive, so they can see what I have updated, and they can also update the file for any changes they have made.  That way we don’t duplicate efforts or have a machine fall through the maintenance cracks.

File sharing is a great use of cloud storage. We were fortunate to take a Mediterranean cruise last year, and we took lots of pictures, more than could be sent via email.  So I copied them to my OneDrive folder and gave access to my relatives so they could peruse the pictures at their leisure without filling up their email inboxes.

Dropbox is a file sharing service that I’ve used for several years.  It allows me to store files in their cloud, and in doing so, I can access the latest version of those files from any of my computers, tablets, and smart phones that have Dropbox installed.  Dropbox comes standard with 2GB of free space, but somewhere along the line I did something – maybe uploaded pictures – that earned me an additional 1.25 GB. That 3.25 GB total more than suits my needs. Any change I make to a file I keep on Dropbox is automatically updated on my other Dropbox enabled devices.

I recently signed up with a service called Box (www.box.com) that gave me another 10GB of free storage space.  Not to be left in the weeds, Apple has given me 5GB of free iCloud storage. If desired, I could buy an additional 50GB for a buck a month, 200GB for $3 per month, or a terabyte for $10 per month, same as Google.  

So between OneDrive (I’m grandfathered at 15GB), Google Drive, my new Box account, plus iCloud, and Dropbox, I’ve got a whopping 148 GB of free cloud space.  Keeping track of where I squirrel stuff away could prove challenging if I actually made use of it all.

Why are these vendors so generous?  I think they see cloud storage as the future, especially as Wi-Fi gets faster and more ubiquitous.  They are giving us a free potato chip and expecting us to like it so much we buy the whole bag.

My Chromebox (desktop) and Chromebook (laptop) are designed around the concept of cloud storage.  They come standard with relatively small hard drives – 16GB. All saved files default to my Google Drive. Will this be the future?  Perhaps, but first the cloud vendors will have to gain our complete confidence and trust that our data is totally secure and readily available through encrypted transfer. We already trust the electric company to deliver power when we flip a switch, and water to flow from the pipe when we turn the knob or lift the lever. Perhaps the day is coming when cloud storage will be seen as reliable as any other utility.