“Please, Sir, may I have some more bytes?” A look at free cloud storage services

I've been using cloud storage since the days of emailing documents to myself. It honestly never made sense to me to store a document on a memory stick and then have to carry that physical object with me everywhere I went. Perhaps it’s just because I inevitably forget everything important every time I go anywhere. Maybe it’s because I liked not waiting for driver software to instal every time I plugged a flash drive into a new computer.

I've been using Google Drive since its days as Google Docs and in that time it had upgraded from the 5GB starting amount to 15 GB, combining storage with Gmail. The real beauty is that this is free storage; I don't have to pay anything to keep my data in the cloud. Google even stopped counting any documents made using its services against the storage limit.

I picked up Evernote as a way to store digital versions of my class notebooks, because tablets and styluses have still not advanced to the point where they make sense in my note-taking workflow (I’d love to just type everything out, but I take a lot of math-based classes, and typing math is difficult under good circumstances). Evernote’s philosophy on storage is that they will store and allow access to as much as you want/need for free, only limiting your upload amount to 60MB per month. This is quite reasonable and very useful, especially for my use case.

I started using Mailbox for iOS, though, and because they were bought out by Dropbox, it became much easier to handle my attachments through that service than through Drive or any other cloud based storage solution. The advantage over Google Drive is that it is more robust as a backup/storage service than Drive out of the box, most likely due to Google focusing more on office productivity than just storage. Dropbox offers 2GB of storage for free, upgradable to 16GB through free methods.

The one thing that I dislike about Dropbox is that it lacks a modern idea of what free cloud storage should be. Dropbox offers 2GB free for an initial account, and then offers various ways to get trivial amounts of additional free storage (250MB for completing their tutorial, 125MB for linking with Facebook, 1GB for linking with Mailbox, etc). The real way to get additional free space is through other people signing up through your referral link, but even through this method, you only gain 500MB at a time. 500MB! This requires you convincing someone that you know to download dropbox onto their computer, and you only get 500MB!

At one time, this system of memory allocation made sense, and it worked. In a time when flash drives barely held 1GB and were expensive, and when other cloud storage services didn’t exist, setting the free tier at 2GB worked. But it’s now an outdated model. Why would I use Dropbox when Google Drive gives me 7.5x the amount of free storage that Dropbox does out of the box? That doesn't even account for the fact that Drive offers essentially infinite storage if you're willing to convert documents into Google’s formats. What advantage does Dropbox still offer?

It gets especially ridiculous with Dropbox’s newest effort, an app called Carousel, which aims to be the home for all of your automatically backed up photos. Yes, they offer 3GB additional storage for free, but another service, Flickr, offers a free terabyte of storage for photos, and the app handles automatic back-up as well. 1TB! 1TB just for photos, not eating up the other storage that you have in other services. That’s 204x the amount of storage that Dropbox gives you for free for using Carousel (in addition to the 2GB you get for just using Dropbox). Even if you have the maximum amount of possible free storage, Flickr still offers 64x the amount of storage. For free.

The other thing that Dropbox’s system of allocating free space does is it causes users searching for more space to spam their friends, family, and social media with their referral links (mine, by the way, is here) in a desperate attempt to gain miniscule amounts of extra space. It’s annoying, and it’s not something that we should have to do in 2014.

So what does it all mean? What’s the point of this post? No storage solution is perfect, and you should weigh the pros and cons of all of your options before you make a decision (but applies to everything in life, doesn't it?). But, I think that from a consumer’s perspective, established companies in the market are going to have to change their game if they intend to stay competetive.