[Lowfer] cloud drives.....my 2 cents

[Douglas D. Williams]

Cloud drives are, simply put, virtual storage for our files.

You upload your files into whatever "cloud drive" you choose, and there it
stays, just like if you saved it onto your PC's hard drive, or a thumb
drive, or whatever.

Actually, that is exactly what is probably happening. You are saving your
files, via the interwebz, onto hard drive(s) in some remote location.

The "cool" thing about this is, if your computer gets struck by lightning,
or your 3-year-old decides to pour her sippy cup into your desktop or
laptop, the files you saved to your cloud drive are still there.

So far, I have experienced two forms of "cloud drive".

The first is Dropbox.

I'll start right off with saying that I love Dropbox. The company that runs
Dropbox has made it so easy to use that even I hardly had any trouble at
all. When you install Dropbox, you get 2 gigabytes of free storage. This is
in the form of a virtual drive on your computer that you can manipulate
(save, delete, change, whatever) just like any folder on your local hard
drive. Also, any file you put into your "Public" Dropbox folder, you can
link to directly and allow anyone, even non-Dropbox users to download or
view, such as Argo screen captures.

Another great use of Dropbox is file sharing. I am a member of a WW2
computer wargaming club. Back in the "old days' we used to send turns to
each other (of whatever game we were playing) via e-mail attachments. No
more. Now, since we are all Dropbox users, we simply create a shared folder
in Dropbox for each opponent we are playing. Since this is a shared virtual
folder, we can each add or delete files from this folder. MUCH easier than
the old e-mail method.

The one thing I don't like about Dropbox is all Dropbox files are mirrored
on your PC, so you don't save any hard drive space.

Today I tried Charter's Cloud service. I've been a Charter "bundle"
customer (internet, phone, TV) for several years. Charter's Cloud service
is free to those of my "tier", but........it sucks. The upload speed to
save files to their cloud server reminds me of my "dialup" days. Actually,
it seems slow enough to remind me of my 1200 baud modem days. It's possible
I had something wrong on my end, but I doubt it.

Long story short, I like Dropbox and am sticking with that for now. I
upgraded from their free 2 GB service to the first level of paid service,
which is, IIRC, 100 GB of secure online storage.

Any of you have any additional input, please share.

73, Doug KB4OER