Data Backup Digest

You need to ask yourself three things about your data: how you are storing it, where you are storing it, and why you are storing it.

Although you might be looking for the best bang for buck cloud storage provider, you can’t choose the right one unless you know the answers to the questions above.

For example, let’s say that you have 1TB of data that you want to back up into the cloud. Does that really need to be in the cloud? Couldn’t you buy a cheap hard drive and chuck everything on that?

Of course, you might indeed need the cloud if you need to access the data wherever you are across multiple devices. Alternatively, perhaps you’re using it as a backup feature and want to keep a second copy of your data at a physical distance from your primary data – a wise choice.

That said, it pays to be frugal with the type of data that you’re storing in the cloud. You’re paying for everything that you upload (in that it eats into your storage space), so there’s no point using it as an archive for data that you’re never going to access.

Cloud storage is also quite volatile. There are lots of players on the market, with new ones cropping up all the time. However, many close down at a similar rate. Or they just suffer outages. Or they hike their prices without warning. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t skimp on quality by dismissing features like encryption or longevity in favour of saving money.

If you want to stick with the big players, you could use Dropbox for £95.88 a year or £7.99 a month. This gives you 2TB of file storage and comes with handy features like 30 day file version retention and simple restoration of deleted files.

Google One charges £79.99 a year or £7.99 a month for 2TB. Some would say that Dropbox is the better service, but actually you might find that Google One does everything you need it to.

Amazon Drive is £159.98 a year for 2TB, which isn’t very good value. Avoid that unless there are some features that really appeal to you, or if you want to stay in the Amazon ecosystem.

Microsoft OneDrive only gives you 50GB of storage for £1.99 a month, but that can be raised to 1TB with a subscription of Office 365 Personal for £59.99 a year. If you already use other Microsoft tools like Office and Skype, this subscription is by far the best value for your money. You get much more than just cloud storage included in the price and it’s unlikely that OneDrive is going to shut down any time soon – though you never know.

There are also smaller services that might be worth checking out. Mega charge £8.91 a month for 1TB, IDrive charge $69.50 a year for 2TB, and pCloud which sells 2TB for £84.99 a year. The latter also offer a lifetime rate of £320 for 2TB. How long “lifetime” actually means remains to be seen, but that’s good value if they stick around.