Online Storage Wars

By Ryan Majeau | Posted in my blog for

Online Storage WarsThe battle for all of your cloud-based needs is heating up! I’m not surprised, and say bring it on! Up until now, the convenience of online storage was a costly one. That’s all changing now!

With the amount of digital data each of us accumulates on a daily basis, the need for more storage has become essential. External hard drives have been great for giving us more breathing room and back our files up to, but how reliable are they? Hard drives = moving parts = everything breaks at some point. I know I’ve lost a few drives over the years…

Thank gawd for the cloud! (for those unaware, the cloud = the web’s ‘space’) The cloud’s a great way to backup and store your files, with the added bonus of giving you to access them all from anywhere, on any device—mobile & tablets too.

When I was looking for a way to sync my work files between my iMac and MacBookPro, Google Drive was my weapon of choice. It syncs my files with the added bonus of keeping them backed up in the cloud. Plus as an avid Gmail user for over 5 years now, I knew that would add another element of seamlessness to the mix.

With almost 80GB of data, I clearly needed more “cloud space” than the standard 15GB Google Drive offers for free. The $4.99/month price tag to add 100GB was a steal! Two months later in March, I got an email from Google saying they were changing their prices. Oh great. Here it comes! Imagine my surprise when the email said the new price for 100GB was now $1.99/month!

I know, that’s not huge savings…but how cool is that? Those with the 1TB monthly plan for $49.99—their price dropped to $9.99! Um, wow.

Hot on the heels of this major price drop, Apple announced their new iCloud Drive storage pricing at WWDC earlier this month. Right now extra iCloud storage costs ~$1.67/month ($20/yr) for +10G, ~$3.34/month ($40/yr) for +20GB, and a whopping $8.34/month ($100/yr) for only +50GB! Coming this fall, +20GB is cut to $0.99/month, and 200GB—a mere $3.99/month! Take that Google!

But wait, there’s more. With Apple and Google slashing their rates, of course Microsoft had weigh in too. Most have never even heard of OneDrive, but Microsoft announced its new prices this week. 100GB was $4.17/month ($50/yr), now it’s $1.99/month. 200GB is down from $8.34/month ($100/yr) to $3.99 (on par with Apple). Their free storage doubles, up from 7GB to 15GB. Oh, and if you’re an Office 365 subscriber, your 20GB of free space will be upgrading to 1TB! Bam!

So what about Dropbox? Looks like the original online storage guys are still clinging to the old ways. Dropbox is known for giving you 2GB for free. You can bump that up a few GBs by bringing friends onboard, syncing photos, and all sorts of other tricks. If you need more than that, 100GB will cost you $9.99—per month (yup, that’s $119.88/yr!). That’s now 5x the price of the competition. Thank you, no. That’s just silly.

With these prices, there’s never been a better time to consider the cloud. What are you waiting for?