Question from a client this morning:
What do you know about these cloud services — where you can put your files on the cloud so you can access from anywhere — and it is also a way to back up files in case other methods fail… like your computer and external hard drives?
That’s a good question!
There are three basic types of cloud services.
Small storage/transfer services
An example of the small storage/transfer type of service is DropBox, a very easy to use system. You have a DropBox folder on your computer and a folder on the DropBox server. Anything you put into the folder on your computer is automatically backed up and synced. If you change it on your computer, it automatically is changed in the cloud.
There is also a public folder on DropBox. You can put files in there and send a link to someone else who doesn’t have a DropBox account so they can download them. (The remainder of your account is secure; if you never put anything in the public folder, no one has access to any of your files.) Unfortunately you can’t allow public access to folders that way — only individual files.
A basic DropBox account (2 GB) is free. If you are interested, use this link to join and then we both get an extra 250 MB for free.
Another option: If you have an Amazon Prime account ($79 per year), you can also get 5 GB backup storage for free through the Amazon Cloud drive. There are paid options if you need more backup space. It’s not as easy to use as DropBox because you have to open a web page to upload your files and there is no automatic syncing. However, you can store music on your Amazon Cloud drive for free — it doesn’t count against your 5 GB allotment.
A third option is Google. A Google Docs account will allow you 1 GB free, secure storage. Additional storage is insanely cheap: $5.00 per year for 5 GB. Additional storage up to 16 terabytes (16,000 GB) is available (if you ever feel the need to store the entire Internet at once).
Back-up-everything-on-your-computer service
Carbonite is an example of a large storage service which could be used as a substitute for an external offsite hard drive. For $59.00 per year, you can back up absolutely everything on your computer, no matter how much there is. Syncplicity ($15 per month for up to 50 GB) and Mozy ($5.99/month for 50 GB, $9.99/month for 125 GB) are two other options.
Truly. Two weeks from start to finish.
Cloud server account
The third type of service is an actual cloud server account, which would take the place of your webhosting account and would hold your websites. This would be useful if your sites had wildly varying traffic. A cloud server expands automatically to accommodate traffic spikes without crashing. It would also be useful for creating a company intranet, where you would need to offer secure access to employees from remote locations.
In most cases, I think this would be needlessly expensive and confusing. There’s a good bit of backend management necessary to run one of these accounts, and I imagine most people have better things to do than learn server management when all they want to do is write a blog.
Thanks for the question!
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