Cloud Storage: 5 Best Apps to Store Online

You are working on a project at office and have created a bunch of files. Now, you go home and need them. How do you easily access the files in another computer? This is where cloud storage comes to help. They let you store and share stuff online, that will enable you to access your content from multiple computers, partner with others in building the content and backup your content. By storing stuff online, you increase the data reliability (in case your PC goes kaput) and reduce painful processes of moving data around unnecessarily. This post will review the best apps to store content online.

Cloud Storage Market

Microsoft’s Omar Shahine and Mike Torres categorize the cloud storage apps into 3 categories:

1. Traditional file storage: Skydrive and Dropbox are examples of this. Here you are presented with the file and folder hierarchies and you can do whatever you want.
2. App storage: Google docs and Evernote are examples of this. Here your storage is mainly tied to your applications – wordprocessor, spreadsheet etc.
3. Device centric storage: iCloud is an example of this. Here storage is seen device-centric view.

Dropbox

Dropbox is the most popular way to store and sync files. It can connect with your Mac, PC or Linux and mobile devices including iPad, iPhone, Android & Blackberry phones. The free services provides 2 GB of storage space free with additional storage can be got in the Pro plans for 100 GB at $20 a month. The best part about dropbox is its good third party support that lets you integrate this with wide range of other applications.

Microsoft Skydrive

Skydrive is the Microsoft’s answer to Dropbox. It lets you sync your files from your Mac and PC with your devices. It provides 25 GB of free space and in the next edition of Windows – Windows 8 Skydrive will be deeply integrated with the operating system to give you a seamless way to share things on the cloud.

Apple iCloud

Apple’s iCloud main focuses on Apple devices and the goal is to easily sync and share photos and documents between your devices.

Google Docs

Google docs is the popular office suite from Google that lets you create, store and share documents – PDFs, word files, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing – and images. The free storage is limited to just 1 GB. Business users using Google apps can also have google docs in their domain.

 Sugarsync

Sugarsync is a startup  similar to Dropbox and shares a lot of common things with Dropbox. It provides a free plan for 5 GB and advanced plans at 30, 60, 100 , 250 and 500 GB. Sugarsync supports more devices than Dropbox, including Kindle and Windows phones, and gives more flexibility when dealing with large files.