
Having your important folders – documents, photos, videos, and so on – automatically mirrored to the cloud is worth that much. So which to use? If your computing life centers around a Mac or Windows desktop or laptop in your life, you should step up to a paid iCloud or OneDrive plan. OneDrive lists 50GB for $1.99 a month and 1TB for $69.99 a year (which includes one desktop or laptop installation of Microsoft Office).ĭropbox, Google and Microsoft offer both monthly and annual rates for their higher-capacity plans, and paying for a year upfront saves you money at all three.Google One provides 100GB for $19.99 a year, 200GB for $29.99 a year, and 2TB for $99.99 a year.Dropbox sells 1TB for $9.99 a month and 2TB for $19.99 a month, the least competitive pricing in this bunch.At iCloud, 50GB costs 99 cents a month, 200GB $2.99 a month and 2TB $9.99 a month.Amazon Drive offers 100GB for $11.99 a year or 1TB for $59.99 a year.The extra storage rates at each fall into two categories: up to 200GB, about enough for a phone or tablet, then the 1 terabyte or more you’d realistically allocate for a laptop or desktop. Five gigs won’t solve photo-storage problems but should let you back up important settings and documents with minimal effort. And Amazon offers unlimited photo storage and 5GB of file storage with a Prime membership.Īpple and Microsoft’s freebies matter more since they’re sewn so tightly into their operating systems.
#Best cloud service for mac book android
Google also offers unlimited free image storage (by compressing large photos in a way I have yet to notice) and excellent organization and sharing features in Android and iOS through its Google Photos app. Instead, you have contrasting pros and cons.Īll but Amazon offer a free tier: 2GB at Dropbox, 5GB at Apple and Microsoft, 15GB at Google.

And if your phone runs Google’s Android and your laptop is a Chromebook, Google One is the obvious complement.īut for a lot of us, no such uniformity exists and there’s no instant pick between those two, Microsoft’s OneDrive, Amazon Drive and Dropbox.

If you stick with Apple’s hardware, sign up for its iCloud service.

#Best cloud service for mac book software
If all of your devices are from one company or run on software from the same firm, that decision can be simple. It’s getting hard to unbox without a signup: Few new gadgets let you get past their welcome screens without inviting you to subscribe to a cloud-storage service to augment their storage and backup their data. Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of free storage Microsoft and Google offer.
