Your Cloud service of choice

[RCBH928]

I have been using cloud services lately with Dropbox and BOX(Dropbox much better experience) but I was browsing more today and I found MediaFire .

I will be honest, I always thought MediaFire is a suspicious website/business and always thought it might shutdown like MegaUpload . To be honest with you I am not sure why MegaUpload was shut down but others like MedaFire and Rapid Share keeps working.

I always thought that any site/business used with wares community are not to be trusted and there is some scam going around with it. But as I visited the MediaFire website, it is listing big businesses that use their services stuff like DHL and INTEL . I guess if these companies can trust them with their files/info, so can I right?

Do you use these services? What do you think of them? Any recommendations? I once paid for Rapid Share a measly amount just to download a file but thats about it. Also I always pay using Paypal if I can

[Cronozilla]

There was federal evidence against the people who owned and ran MegaUpload, that they were actively helping piracy as well as doing many other illegal activities that have nothing to do with piracy.

Personally, I don't trust most cloud services ... not because of data security or anything like that, there's just no way you can tell me my data will always be accessible. Too much can go wrong.

But if I had to choose something ... something like Ubuntu's service would be high up there.

[Ivo]

I use Dropbox and love it for what it is. It mostly "just works". For me it is good for easily sharing files with others and keeping a bunch of stuff available to me (and synchronized) across the computers I use regularly (and if I really need something on a computer without the client installed, I can use the website to access it).
I don't put any really sensitive material there but I don't think it is really that risky.

Before settling with Dropbox I tried larger storage like Google's GSpace and Microsoft's Skydrive, together with Gladinet which in theory should enable me to use those services automatically (similarly to what Dropbox actually does). That wasn't working so well, there were issues with integrating Gladinet with the actual services and Dropbox, as I wrote above, "just works".

Ivo.

[lisalover1]

I am using Box as of now, for no other reason than they give smartphone users 50 free gigabytes of storage for life, which is pretty great in my book. But, Dropbox far and away has the best service: Integration with tons of outside programs, local file syncing, and a better mobile access app than Box. But, they only give you 2 gigabytes of storage for free, which is a big sticking point. (Yes, I know you can get a lot more via referrals, but doing that always felt kind of intrusive on my part.)

[RCBH928]

@Ivo

Dropbox is good, and BOX service is...simply bad it just doesn't work right its very un- intuitive.
But both are very expensive when you look at how much you pay monthly for what you get.

For $200/year you get only 100GB of storage. YIKES! I can get like 2 , 2TB hard drives for the same price that will last me years!

[Ivo]

@Ivo

Dropbox is good, and BOX service is...simply bad it just doesn't work right its very un- intuitive.
But both are very expensive when you look at how much you pay monthly for what you get.

For $200/year you get only 100GB of storage. YIKES! I can get like 2 , 2TB hard drives for the same price that will last me years!

For extra storage and full backup I use an external HDD myself.

For synchronizing or transferring to others a bunch of relevant files I find even the 2.00+0.25 GB free account of Dropbox is really convenient (if anyone wants the extra 0.25, ask one of us that already use Dropbox, like Lisalover to send you a referral link - both parties get 0.25 extra).

It helps if you learn to work around the limitations (e.g. instruct the other people to move the files out of the shared folders when the transfer ends and so on). It's not meant to backup your whole hard drive.

Ivo.

[Dakinggamer87]

I have used both Dropbox and Box for simple documents I upload such as my resume and references. Otherwise I will use my external drives for massive media data backups.

[RCBH928]

Yeah its perfect for your regular documents. I must say that media is blowing storage needs out of proportion with sing games as big as 7GB and its no longer rare to see a full box set of a series downloaded(legit or not!!!) on a computer, you can imagine that something like 24 would be pretty huge in HD!

Ivo does the 0.250 still works if I have an account with Dropbox already?

[Ivo]

Ivo does the 0.250 still works if I have an account with Dropbox already?

Sorry, no. Only for new accounts. You can get incremental 0.25 by getting other people to join though. Note they have some checks to be sure you don't fake it with multiple accounts, you won't get the bonus.

If you happen to be a have a student e-mail account (like .edu) and register that e-mail with dropbox, they will send it an e-mail to confirm it is yours, and after doing that you get 0.50 instead of 0.25 for each person you got into dropbox (and it is retroactive).

EDIT: I just read that apparently everyone gets 0.50 per referral now, not just students.

Ivo.

[eSPy]

I really like the setup of Dropbox. You can use it on pretty much any device ether via the software or your browser of choice.

Also, it's easy it is to give other people access to folders for sharing/working on documents. Very helpful for work or school projects.