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Help Me Choose an e-Cloud.

So I've got all these devices online ... Home PC on Win8.1 and 2 Androids, plus TVs and VoiP phones and printers and so forth, and I will probably be adding more like cameras and smart-watch. All are web-enabled. And all of them have their own peculiar OpSys.

I'd like to streamline it and make it easier to manage. I think a key element would be to keep all the data in one place for easy access, and that means using a Cloud of some sort.

I've already got several clouds. Google, Symantec, HP, Nikon, Samsung ... every time I buy a piece of hardware, it seems like a little piece of The Cloud comes with it.

I want to narrow it down to just one, so I can connect with my data easier and faster and not have to use a bunch of different softwares and remember lots of passwords.

But which one do I choose to be my primary? Obviously, I want one that's free and will stay that way forever. But I'm not opposed to paying a modest fee for a commercial Cloud if it provides enhanced features.

I don't need a lot of space. I'm not into collecting videos or music or visual images. Most of what I have are texts I have written and interesting items I've clipped from online. I also like to make backups of my photos and financial files and so forth. I currently have less than 50G of raw data stored offline, not counting OS and Apps, and my online presence is scattered among numerous clouds but probably amounts to less than 10G total..

I'm leaning towards Google to be my primary, with a copy held on the Symantec cloud.

Are there any good cloud-management softwares available? I find all the different clouds each have their own peculiarities and none of them are particularly user-friendly.

So what should I do?
 
well. when you figure this out, please let me know!!
I have same dilemma!!

Perhaps Drop Box, or iCloud, or Microsoft OneDrive.
Still not sure!

Let us know what you discover!!
 
I can't say what will work best for you, but at least for the devices I have in the mix (tablet running Win 8.1 & Office 365, Windows Phone, XBox) OneDrive integrates pretty much seamlessly.
 
I can't say what will work best for you, but at least for the devices I have in the mix (tablet running Win 8.1 & Office 365, Windows Phone, XBox) OneDrive integrates pretty much seamlessly.

That makes a lot of sense, since you have all Microsoft devices.
 
My Android works great with onedrive and for a lot of stuff I am using it more and more over Dropbox it is way better for real time edits and up to date file versions.
 
There's a price war in cloud storage now, so I'd go with one of the big boys - Google, Microsoft or Amazon Cloud. Commercial services like Dropbox are having to slash their rates to stay competitive, but they don't have the luxury of being subsidized by other parts of their business. I have long term concerns about their survival.
 
There's a price war in cloud storage now, so I'd go with one of the big boys - Google, Microsoft or Amazon Cloud. Commercial services like Dropbox are having to slash their rates to stay competitive, but they don't have the luxury of being subsidized by other parts of their business. I have long term concerns about their survival.
+1 ... I'm still leaning towards Google, I doubt they will be going out of business any time soon.

Whereever I go, I'll schedule automatic backups to a cloud somewhere else, probably Symantec, since they are the most secure of all the Cloud services I currently subscribe to.

I'm worried about privacy, though ... if I drop my stuff into Google, or any other brand of service, what is to prevent them from analyzing and examining everything I put up there? And what will they do with MY DATA once they collect it?
 
I have the free version of Dropbox on all my computers and my phone and use it to move photos around mostly. I recently used it to send a link to several insurance companies of a folder with about 50 photos and two videos in it. Convenient as hell.

It starts off at 2 GB, but there's various hoops you can jump through to get it higher, with a max cap of 20 GB.

The paid version is ridiculously expensive, though. When I priced it several years ago it was about $1,000 a year.
 
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+1 ... I'm still leaning towards Google, I doubt they will be going out of business any time soon.

Whereever I go, I'll schedule automatic backups to a cloud somewhere else, probably Symantec, since they are the most secure of all the Cloud services I currently subscribe to.

I'm worried about privacy, though ... if I drop my stuff into Google, or any other brand of service, what is to prevent them from analyzing and examining everything I put up there? And what will they do with MY DATA once they collect it?

They'll create a profile that's used to serve up somewhat more relevant ads than the random ones you're getting now.
No more, no less.
 
I'm worried about privacy, though ... if I drop my stuff into Google, or any other brand of service, what is to prevent them from analyzing and examining everything I put up there? And what will they do with MY DATA once they collect it?

Nothing much stopping them. Do some Google searches and you will see Microsoft has banned numerous accounts before for having pictures containing nudity uploaded to Skydrive (now Onedrive) accounts. Doesn't sound too private to me. But its often the trade off for letting someone else hold onto your data for free.

Something like SpiderOak is a good choice for privacy, but I don't know if they offer a free version any longer.

My personal favorite choice, would be something you put together yourself. Something like a Synology storage drive with whatever size hard drive you want. It attaches to your own network, but connects to the Internet so you can access your files remotely. Compatible with everything, there's even apps for uploading photos and data from iPhone, Android, etc.
 
If you just want something for pictures, the lowest tier of Smugmug is awesome. Unlimited storage for photos and video. No size limit for pictures. You can put passwords on all of your albums. $40 a year.
 
If you just want something for pictures, the lowest tier of Smugmug is awesome. Unlimited storage for photos and video. No size limit for pictures. You can put passwords on all of your albums. $40 a year.
You lost me with the last sentence.

I'm not opposed to paying for a service, but if I can get a good one for free, I'll go that route. I'm already putting out around $50 a year for my Norton360 license, and that includes 32G of cloud storage, of which I'm only using up about 1.2G, for N360 automated backups. I'm not sure if I can use the rest of the Norton cloud for anything I want, but I'll chat with one of their tech-reps and see what they say.

BTW, Norton360 is the best utility software I've ever used on a Windows machine, and now I'm running it on my 2 Androids, too. It is one of the only pieces of software that I pay for, and I've been gladly renewing my license each year for as long as I can remember.
 
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Well, I've started my transition.

I created a folder on my desktop called drive.google.com and every data file I come across is being shuffled into there. Once I get it online, I'll sort it out and create subfolders and organize all these files so I can find them when I need them.

I'm also going through my softwares and creating drive.google.com as my default path for storage.

I already had 15G for free on Google Drive, so I'm using that as my primary Cloud. I'll set up an automatic backup to the Symantec cloud in the next day or two. I've barely scratched the surface on available space. I moved over up everything I could find from my Win8 home PC and over the next few days I'll copy stuff from my Flickr, Nikon, Microsoft and other clouds.

It is a time-consuming process and sometimes requires me to think harder than I want to, but the final results should be worth it.
 
Well, I've started my transition.

I created a folder on my desktop called drive.google.com and every data file I come across is being shuffled into there. Once I get it online, I'll sort it out and create subfolders and organize all these files so I can find them when I need them.

I'm also going through my softwares and creating drive.google.com as my default path for storage.

I already had 15G for free on Google Drive, so I'm using that as my primary Cloud. I'll set up an automatic backup to the Symantec cloud in the next day or two. I've barely scratched the surface on available space. I moved over up everything I could find from my Win8 home PC and over the next few days I'll copy stuff from my Flickr, Nikon, Microsoft and other clouds.

It is a time-consuming process and sometimes requires me to think harder than I want to, but the final results should be worth it.

Well, it seems like the above set-up was wrong. All I did was to create a folder on my PC desktop called "drive.google.com" but anything that I put in there remained on my PC. It didn't go into the cloud, and I couldn't access it from my Android devices.

So here's the RIGHT way to do it ... https://www.google.com/drive/download/ This installs an app on your PC or Mac and gives you a pipeline straight to the cloud. I already had this on my Androids but wasn't using it.

I already have all my PC data files located in one place (on the PC) so its a simple matter to copy them into the cloud.

The hard part is trying to figure out how to set up all my other softwares and apps to use the cloud by default, but I'll get there.
 
I used Google Drive (Gdrive) as it works on my Iphone, android tablet, windows laptop and macbook pro. Its big enough and works quickly. For my apple devices, I also have 20Gb of Icloud storage for backups and photo storing.
 
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