50 Shades of Free Cloud Storage

You may have heard that the cost of cloud storage is near zero. This has driven many cloud services to offer more and more free storage as part of their offering. For your storing pleasure, I have collected below 50 cloud services that offer free storage. This list alone gives you over 23,000 GBs of free storage!

Of course, not all services are created equal. Some offer a ridiculous amount of storage that most of us will unlikely ever use up (e.g. Tencent 10 TBs). Others offer a nominal amount that could be used up in short time if you incorporate it into your workflow (e.g. Evernote 50 MBs). Some services may be better suited for specific use cases like photo uploading, media streaming or backup from a NAS storage device. You may choose to utilize certain services because of geographical location. 

If you are going to make use of several services, as we all do, a good way to provide a unified experience is odrive. With odrive, you can access from a single folder on your PC and Mac several services on the list such as Dropbox, GoogleDrive, Box, and OneDrive, as well as Facebook and Instagram. 

Enjoy!

How to "Get All Your Sh*t Together"

If your daily commute here in the Bay Area goes by Brokaw Road on the 880, you might have noticed a new billboard on the side of the freeway starting today. 

Silicon Valley, don't be alarmed by the giant poopy emoji. It is a friendly sign that we just put up to kick off odrive's beta campaign ;) 

We Built odrive Because Everything is Everywhere 

Do you use Google Drive? Or maybe OneDrive? Do you have multiple Dropbox accounts, with one for your team at work and another one for your personal music collection? Or maybe you have both Box and Dropbox Pro? How many photos did you upload to Facebook over the last 10 years? Oh right, and how about all the email attachments you've accumulated on Gmail? 

Truth is a lot of us use a lot of apps now days. Your clients might want to share files with Box, but then your friends want to share videos on Dropbox. It's hard to choose just one. 

We created odrive to make your life a little easier as your digital life continues to grow. You don't have to choose. Don't worry about consolidating or switching back and forth. Let us help you simplify so you can just get to all your stuff hassle-free. 

Get All Your Sh*t Together 

odrive is your folder to everything online. It links to your existing apps and other storage services, so you can simplify how to access and manage all your stuff that is scattered everywhere. 

With odrive, you can get everything together in a simple sync folder. Our progressive sync lets you quickly sync only the stuff you want when you want it. And if you don't really need those files anymore? Just unsync anything with one click so you don't have to use up all your hard drive space.

Everything in One Folder

Our goal is to help you get everything together in the easiest way possible. Right now you can use odrive with Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Facebook and Instagram. Soon you'll be able to use it with Gmail, Box, Salesforce and more. 

Oh and it's more than just apps! We also have a way for you to connect to your existing storage that isn't in the cloud. Soon you can even use odrive with your file servers too! 

We Respect Your Privacy - What's Yours is ALWAYS Yours

Your files are as safe as wherever you already uploaded them to. Don't worry because we're not storing anything. odrive doesn't copy or store any of your files. It is just an easier way to access what you already have in one place (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc). We do not have access to your stuff so you can have the peace of mind knowing whatever is yours will always be yours. 

Did I even mention odrive is free? Just download odrive right now at www.odrive.com.

Do it. Try it. Tell us what you think and we hope you'll love it too :)

Cheers,

Julia 

Designers, How to Use Cloud Storage to Improve Your Client Relationships

I am no longer a freelance designer and there were a plethora of reasons why I left the solo life (*cough* legit health insurance *cough*). As I moved away from my clients, I found they were hard-pressed to let me go. So for most of them, I offered to continue working on a “need only” basis (which loosely translates to a “most of my free time” basis).

Technology builds better relationships

Back when I was 100% freelance, I quickly adopted cloud storage because it allowed me to share, organize, and backup important work. As a part of agreeing to anything contractual, I made sure my clients and I had shared cloud storage of some kind. I required them to 1) provide me access to their existing storage or 2) offered to create an account in the cloud storage provider of their choice. More often than not we chose Google Drive, because it was 15GBs, had email associated with it for additional communication, and productivity apps that made it easy for my clients to make revisions.

I shared this idea with many of my colleagues (at the time I was getting a design related Masters) who were quick to follow suit with their clients. Not only did it make for faster work environment, it also made my customers feel more in control and connected to our projects.

Conquering chaos in the cloud

At my peak, I had 20+ clients I was consistently working with – which meant I had 20 different cloud storage areas with all my files. Having all that free cloud storage was great for business, but it made for an organizational nightmare at times. My preference was (still is) to work with desktop apps over browsers. But in order to work with multiple Google Drive accounts, I had to log out and log in with different credentials (same with Dropbox and OneDrive) and wait for all the files to be downloaded locally. I wasn’t about to waste my time or limited disk space doing this, so I stuck to the web browser. This left everything in my download folder, which required more steps to stay organized and still required local disk space.

Efficiency, thy name is odrive

It wasn’t until I started working with my new company, a cloud storage company, that I realized there were easier ways to share storage. In winter of last year, we announced the beta for our newest product odrive which turned out to be the answer I had been looking for years ago. odrive lets you connect to all your different cloud storage (even multiple accounts on the same platform) and makes all that storage walk, talk, and act like local storage. Here’s what my work environment looks like with the clients I still have.

All the folders are associated with the different storage accounts of my different clients. I don’t really care where the storage is, I just need my stuff when I need to work on it. With odrive, the files are stored locally, so I can work on them locally. I make an edit. It saves to the cloud automatically.

I work on video quite a bit and we all know video files can quickly eat up your disk space. I used to load everything onto my external drives to save space on my computer, now I put my free cloud storage to work. I can pick and choose files I no longer need and simply unsync them from my computer. They stay safely stored in the cloud and I can access them anytime I need them again.

A better version of me

odrive makes me more legit and professional because I can work way faster and stay organized easily. Not only do I use it to work with my former freelance clients, I’m currently the resident media/web dude/graphic artist at Oxygen Cloud and use it to collaborate with outside vendors (because I too enjoy being closer to the work being done for me). Give it a try and post some comments about your thoughts, improvements, or any other needs you have related to cloud storage. 

Cloud Storage Is Eating The World Alive →

“Dead man walking.” That is what many in the storage industry are calling IBM’s storage hardware business. But its storage competitors, including EMC or HP, should not be so quick to wave that flag, as they may follow suit before too long. We are already seeing similar trending signs of their downfall.

War of the Giants

The cloud storage war being waged by Amazon, Google and Microsoft has been well publicized, and is resulting in the cost of all cloud infrastructure including storage racing to zero.

As you can see from the graph below, Amazon was the only real game in town for several years, and the price of cloud storage hardly moved the needle. It was only after Microsoft and Google got into the game in 2010 that we saw any real price movements. There were two distinct price battles waged in 2012, with moderate price drops. Earlier this year in March, the gloves came off and the cloud storage prices bottomed out to the current $.024/GB level.

Where do we go from here? Undoubtedly, to zero. When? Perhaps as soon as this summer or by year end. Will it literally go to zero? Maybe no, maybe yes. If you only had to pay $.001/GB, that works out to $1/TB. Oh yeah, that feels like zero!

Casualty of War

It’s well established that cloud storage is 10X better. It’s more accessible, more secure, elastic, pay-as-you-go.

Today, we are all on mobile devices, work everywhere and generate ever increasing amount of data. Our work and personal lives are set up as the perfect playground for cloud storage.

Now that the cost of cloud storage is near-zero, the business choice to abandon clunky, expensive traditional storage is a no brainer.

Some Not-So-Bold Predictions

For most small businesses and newer companies born in the cloud, the shift to cloud storage is already happening and will be at close to 100 percent in three years.

For larger businesses with existing data centers and lots of existing data, the shift will be slower and take a different path. Most will start with less sensitive data sets. As reflexive concerns like data sovereignty and regulatory compliance give way to convenience and common sense, the transformation will be complete. Within five years, I believe that a majority of enterprises will have at least 50 percent of their data in the cloud.

Zombie Life

No doubt, the traditional storage players will attempt to slow the adoption with the same tired, overplayed FUD, but the train has already left the building. However, this will just be prolonging the inevitable. It will be like the un-dead walking among us. As we’ve seen in the movies, the zombies can now run fast and talk intelligibly. Perhaps the traditional storage players have a fighting chance after all.

Author’s note: The data research for the top graph involved a mix of public announcements, a search of the Internet Archive and efforts from others who attempted to track the price changes such asDavid Rosenthal. This also involved some guesstimation on my part for some begin and end dates of a price change as I was able to ascertain a price on a given date but was not able to confirm with a public announcement.

As you can see, the negative trend spans the industry and does not discriminate.

Editor’s note: Alex Teu is the vice president of business development at Oxygen Cloud and odrive.