Whether you’ve got a big microSD card in your phone or you’ve got plenty of on-board storage, backing your stuff up to the cloud is always a good idea.
There’s a big selection of online storage providers, or you can get yourself a NAS drive and backup those precious pictures of your bottom, your cat or your mate being “unwell” after that a few too many drinks at that Halloween party. Trouble is, with our phones now recording in ultra-HD and taking snaps in super-high detail, if you’re using free online storage you may consume it quickly. As an example, a 13 megapixel picture is about 2.9MB in size. That means that you’ll get around 350 pictures in every 1GB of storage.
That’s not bad, but a 10 second HD video will consume about 25MB. Crank that up to Ultra HD (3840×2160 / 4K) and you’re going to be touching 38MB for a 10 second video. I’ve just recorded a test one minute-long 4K video and it’s consumed 220MB.
We film everything on our phones now. Our children playing at the park, our family get-togethers, our special times. Relying on that on-board storage or a removable microSD and some auto-backup to a free online system won’t last long.
So, if we’re buying phones with 32GB or 64GB of on-board storage but backing up to some online system offering just 10GB or 15GB, what’s the best option if you want some really meaty storage?
I think I’ve found some good choices if you want to crank things up a notch. I’m not talking 100GB or 200GB – let’s cranky it up to 1TB or more shall we? First, and rather unexpectedly for me, is MediaFire. This is a company that is probably familiar to many for hosting some “interesting” files over the years. However, they’re based in Texas and there’s mobile apps for Android and iOS that’ll let you auto-backup your pictures and movies.
The best bit? Right now everything is half price. The prices were cheap already but, if you want to pay monthly, you can get a whacking great 1TB for $2.49 per month, which is just £1.55 per month. If you pay a year up front you’ll effectively get two months free, so for $24.99 (around £15.54) you’ll get a whole year, even though you’re paying 10 months worth of payments in one go.
Another random online storage provider that you’ve probably never considered is Knowhow Cloud. It’s from those people at Currys / PC World and they have mobile apps too. There’s a whacking 2TB for £30 per year, which works out at £2.50 per month or you can crank it up to a ma-hoosive 4TB for £50 per year, which is £4.17 per month. I know it’s a truck-load of space, but you can use this on all your devices – your phone, your girlfriends’ phone, your laptop etc etc.
If you don’t quite need that much, the Knowhow people have 500GB for £15 per year.
Otherwise, if you don’t fancy spending anything, Google Drive offers 15GB and OneDrive will deliver 5GB free. The likes of Dropbox will also give you a small amount of free storage, which you can boost through referrals.
However, if you don’t want to rely on someone else to take care of your storage, grab yourself a NAS drive and copy stuff to that. Then you’ve got complete control over your data and you won’t wake up to find that the cloud storage company have gone bust overnight, taking your data too.
(By the way, weird picture at the top is courtesy of Iiu Susiraja, an artist who takes abstract pictures of herself).