Saturday 11 October 2014

Investigating cloud storage solutions

This morning I finished processing the pics I was working on yesterday. Then I looked to see if there was an alternative to Microsoft OneDrive that didn't have sharing limits (or had generous sharing limits).

Google Drive is one possibility, but it appears they have undisclosed limits, just like the Microsoft solution: Does Google Drive have a download bandwidth limit? and Google drive limit number of download. Like Microsoft, Google do not make this information easy to find. Indeed, the 'best answer' chosen by a Google employee states that there is no limit, so it seems like Google are trying to purposefully mislead people, which is even worse than Microsoft.

Still, I get the impression that the limit on Google Drive is likely higher than the limit on MS OneDrive.

Copy sounds like an interesting alternative, but again, they do not supply any information about sharing limits. There is a question on their forums about it (Fair usage limitation - are there any?), but it doesn't have an answer. So I messaged their support to try and find out the answer.

Another cloud storage solution is Box. While they're not up front about their sharing restrictions, they do have it covered in their help articles: How Does Box Measure Bandwidth Usage?. The article tells you the limits, and I get the impression that you can monitor how close you are to your limit from your account.

There is a max file size of 250MB for free accounts, which would mean that uploading a zip of RAW files might be too much. But they are up front about this, you don't even have to search their support docs to find this out.

Yandex.Disk has sharing restrictions. They won't tell you what they are, but do at least tell you they exist in their FAQ: Yandex.Disk FAQ: Why is access to a public file restricted?

Most of the rest of the day I was working on an article for my photo website.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

It's important to know what you are getting into. Moreso if you'd be entrusting your data to a third party. It's interesting that you're concerned with download bandwidth limits , since others mostly look at the amount of space in which they can store their files. Any updates as to what you plan to use eventually? Either way, I hope you share it with us so that more cloud storage users would know. Thanks!

Roberta Scott @ Spectrum Information Services

Rusty said...

Well, I opened a Baidu Cloud account, which gives you 2TB of storage, and so far as I understand, has unlimited bandwidth. It's difficult to find info on the bandwidth restrictions though, so I could be wrong there.

But in the end, I just decided to host the files on my own webhosting, but not link to them, so I shouldn't have to worry about all my bandwidth being eaten up by bots downloading the files.