"Cloud storage, which one?" Topic

OP title says it all. I'm ready to stop hassling with an external backup drive, or any physical backups at all. Which cloud storage offering/option do "you" recommend?

Try to find one where your files are SECURE.

And yes, I know what they all say…

OneDrive, the MS free cloud service, is of course almost a default feature of Windoze 10. Anybody have anything good or bad to say about using OneDrive?

I use Dropbox, pCloud and Google Drive. I can recommend them all and can access my files from across several devices with different operating systems.

Alternatively if you don't trust these companies then set up your own server and do cloud back up via next cloud

Highly dependent. Depends on what you want to store and how you want to access it. Serious security is not really an option for cloud storage.

I use OneDrive and Dropbox.
Both seem to be fine for me.

Dropbox

I backed out of OneDrive this morning. My 'puter turned into a total pig. I don't know what pushed it over that line of performance, because the task manager stats show pretty much the same thing, before and after deselecting the sync and backup options (which didn't seem to be working anyway?). But the reboot after deselecting returned my 'puter performance to what it was before. Last night I even had pages refusing to load. This morning they just took "forever" to load. I am still hoping for a cloud alternative to backups, because my peripheral hard drive takes up a whopping one-third of my CPU.

I'm not really worried about "security" in the cloud. I suppose that I could simply update various folders from time to time, thus backing up new files and changes. Say weekly? I've already uploaded all of "Documents" and "Pictures" to OneDrive. So theoretically I am all backed up at the moment. I just don't have any automatic backup capacity yet……………….

I want to add some details to my experience with OneDrive so far.

All bad.

I turned it off, unlinked my account, and Voila! my machine perked right up, probably becoming faster than since I bought it. You see, OneDrive was firing up each time I booted up, and I didn't understand until this week what I was looking at.

When I actually tried to figure out how to use the "service", I caused nothing but trouble. First of all, I noticed that nothing on OneDrive was current with my folders/files. Why, if OneDrive were running, was it not syncing with my hard drive? No answer. I manually put everything into the OneDrive folders that were on my hard drive. The correct boxes were checked on "Settings". I made sure. Then I experimented. I uploaded a video file and checked OneDrive to see if it had appeared there. Nope. I reversed the process. Still no syncing going on.

I tried a few more things, nothing worked. And meanwhile, my machine had turned into a total pig.

Then I noticed an anomaly: even with OneDrive set to NOT sync, i.e. not try and bring over files to itself from my hard drive, if I hovered over the OneDrive cloud icon, a little popup showed activity: something like this: "140 MB of 44 GB transferred at 17 KB per second; 13,748 files remaining". WTH? At that rate the transfer of files from my hard drive to OneDrive would take forever. And why was this happening in the first place, when I had physically moved all of my files to OneDrive? They were nowhere near 44 GB of stuff. Huh? Rather than try and sleuth an answer, I simply unlinked, after first unchecking every single box in "Settings". It is dead.

And I have a fast machine again. But I still want to use a cloud. Because this WD Passport peripheral drive backup uses nearly a third of my CPU a lot of the time, for no reason that I cause, it just does. And that amount of hogged resources, for a backup that hasn't got anything to back up, really annoys me……………

I think that must have been "170 KB" per second, not 17 KB per second! But still, crawling. (And I was mistaken: I do have c. 44 GB of stuff in Pictures and Documents; but that's a non sequitur as pertaining to OneDrive being a total pain.)

Well, yesterday, after the failure, aaagain, of my WD Passport backup hard drive, I "sucked it up buttercup" and bought a year's worth of 1 TB of storage with Dropbox.

The "failure" of the hard drive wasn't that the hardware itself failed. So far, out of our three WD Passport hard drives, only my wife's first one has physically failed; her current one was sent out by Western Digital as a replacement under warranty. No. The failure was software related. Their "solution" is to remove the software and reinstall it. Except, this time it didn't work. Last August it did, and the time before that, and the time before that, every few months: the "Continuous backup" doesn't. It stops updating, which reduces you to having to physically copy and paste to your backups. Stupid.

So! I am now in the cloud. And I have to say, compared to One Drive, night and day. I can't even tell most of the time that Dropbox is uploading my files. The most telling evidence is a few seconds more time required to open a file and display it. While One Drive was uploading (at the above described piggy rate), my 'puter alternated from virtually unusable to okay. But the uploading of my c. 44 GB of stuff would take literally days on days.

Dropbox. Ten bucks for one year. The price of a peripheral hard drive, that stops working as designed/needed. My wife's first one lasted less than a year. The only thing that will take out the cloud is a massive EMP. In which case, we all go back to the beginning together………..

Hah! I just checked out my peripheral hard drive, and during the night it backed up. TOO LATE, you thrice bepoxed device: you are replaced. You are superfluous. You are redundant. You are gone.

Probably the addition of Dropbox and the resulting (ongoing) activity slapped the WD Passport software awake somehow. I can't be bothered to investigate further…………..

I have to admit that I was hasty in my criticism of OneDrive. The slowness of the uploader is apparently typical. Right now, Dropbox is uploading at c. 78-81 KB per second. If I am not doing anything else. By coming here to write this, the upload "speed" (heh) is c. 65 KB per second. Slooooooow. It shows "five days left", up from "four days left" when I wasn't doing anything else. But the whole point is, I CAN do this and other things while the uploader keeps doing its job in the background. If my resources bog down, I can pause the sync for as long as I want/need to. I've been leaving my 'puter on during the night.

And I have packed away my WD Passport, and uninstalled all the software to it.

So I got a new notification: something about my backup hard drive not being connected, and how about hooking it back up again, and how am I going to choose to back up my machine? I have ignored it so far.

But how do I tell Windoze that I am backing up to the Dropbox cloud, and I don't NEED them to tell me to use anything from Microsoft, thank you very much?

My company offers one which is unlimited storage starting at £6.00 GBP a month.

great war ace – get a program called Ccleaner, you can see a list of what is going to be started up on boot up and turn off ones you don't need – ie onedrive. there's lots of stuff that starts processes on boot even if you are not using the software.

Cool, I didn't notice that Ccleaner did that when I tried it briefly a while ago.

I did manage to turn off OneDrive successfully.

£6.00 GBP per month, that is $1.21 USD cheaper per month. Too late now. I'm "in" for a year. And I guess I'm invested, since I don't want to go through this uploading crap again.

I just put CCleaner on to take a look at my startup programs. And I don't see anything I want disabled or removed. Thanks anyway. CCleaner gone now, again.