Changing Cloud Storage Providers

Just over two years ago, I got my first Windows phone. It was nice and I used it until it broke. It came with OneDrive as the default location to back up and save photos. Since then, I’ve gone though another Windows phone and am now on an Android, and I’ve always just kept using OneDrive because it was what I used.

Also about two years ago, Microsoft came out with a Bing Rewards program where you gained points by searching with Bing. One of the possible rewards was a year of 100 GB of OneDrive storage. For two years, I renewed it and all was well. I did use Bing as my search engine, but it’s fine.

Until last week, when my freebie finally expired, and I didn’t see another 100 GB for a year offer in Bing Rewards. It was time to look around. Since it’s my money now, I took the opportunity to look at a few options: DropBox, Amazon Cloud Storage, Google Drive, and keeping OneDrive. Here’s what I found:

  • DropBox: Nice, easy to use, and accessible from anywhere. Nice integration into Explorer with the Windows app. $100 a year for 1 TB isn’t crazy, but way more than the 30 GB I need right now.

  • Amazon Cloud Storage: $70 a year for unlimited storage, which is sweet, and since I’m a Prime member, I have unlimited photo storage anyway. The only things are that I don’t know anyone else using it for their storage, and since I have 3 Kindle Fires and 2 phones, I don’t know how it would handle the uploads from all the devices. I don’t want to end up syncing down videos of my kids doing karaoke on their tablets.

  • Google Drive: Works on anything and I’ve used it before. $2 a month for 100 GB of storage. I like the price and the size. I have an Android phone, so it will definitely work with it.

  • OneDrive: I could just stay, but it was $2 a month for 50 GB of storage. Why would I pay double for less space than I can get from Google?

Frankly, I think DropBox had the nicest looking integration into Windows, in the Explorer sidebar and everything, but that was just too much money. The deciding factor was that at www.mover.io, I can copy files from one service to another automatically for free from several providers. Amazon is not a supported provider, but the others all are. I went with Google Drive because I don’t see any faults with it, the standard plan matches what I need right now, and it’s supported by www.mover.io.

The files are moved and I’m moving all of my pointers. Microsoft lost this OneDrive customer, though, not due to how the service worked or anything else, just because of a simple pricing problem.

Written on March 9, 2016