Free cloud storage? Dropbox gives you 2GB while Windows Live Skydrive offers as much as 25GB gratis—with the small snag that no file can exceed 50MB in size. Adam Dachis of Lifehacker comes up with a good wheeze today: Use all the free bits of the cloud systems and organise your backups into different categories to overcome the problems of fragmentation. The suggestion has the added advantages for the paranoid that all eggs are not in one basket. Here’s how it stacks up:
- Dropbox, 2GB
- SugarSync, 5GB
- Amazon CloudDrive, 20GB (with the purchase of an album for as little as 89 cents)
- Windows Live SkyDrive, 50GB (individual file limitation of 50MB)
- MemoPal, 3GB
- ADrive, 50GB
- IDrive, 5GB
That tots up to an impressive 135GB for 55p, comfortably more than the 100GB you get from Dropbox for $199 a year (£125). You’ve got to be dedicated to fiddle around with all these different sites and, without doubt, it’s all a lot more hassle than paying for one service such as Dropbox. But probably it’s worth a punt. I am going to try out CloudDrive for my music and, possibly, pictures, and see how it works.