The Acronis TrueImage thread has a sort of discussion on could services. At the moment there are a fair few options out there.

Bitcasa - It's currently free while in Beta, I've not used it for a while as it was very buggy but it could have shaped up nicely now, the gist of it is you drop everything you want clouded into specific folder(s) flagged in Bitcasa, then these folders are automatically synced with the Bitcasa cloud. If it's cheap when it goes final and they sort the software out it will be a good solution I think.

Google Cloud - I tried it for work, don't really like it at all, I don't think its particularly user friendly or convenient. Pricing is on the link, first 5GB is free, with data rates for beyond that on top.

Dropbox - Which I'm sure everyone has heard of and probably played with, I don't really care for it that much and stopped using it, it's more for people that need to access their files remotely or share them a lot, which I don't. Their free package is 2GB minimum and up to 18GB (500MB per referral).

Others that have been mentioned before are Carbonite and Mozy, I've no experience of them though. There's a website ranking them here that might be useful for a quick scan through to get an idea http://www.cloudstorage.org.uk/


lol this thread brings the whole discussion full circle 

I had a look through some of those on that link in my above post, beware that a lot of them seem to promise a lot for free but actually when you read further deliver very little without the words 'monthly plans' 'rates' and 'prices' suddenly appearing, but no links to show what they are. Best off sticking to the more widely recognised ones I think.

I don't think there are many if any using it on here, although I'm starting to look in to it..

How much stuff do you want to put on the cloud?

And also depends what you mean by best whatever you choose I'd make sure that you are only using the cloud for a backup and not a permanent storage location for your files.. look at the last link above

My main usage would be photos and videos, all family stuff. Any films and music will not be backed up by any cloud based service.

Google drive or Amazon's offering will give security of being a big company so they won't disappear like smaller start ups.

My main usage would be photos and videos, all family stuff. Any films and music will not be backed up by any cloud based service.

Google drive or Amazon's offering will give security of being a big company so they won't disappear like smaller start ups.

Google drive means your data will be examined for advertising relevant keywords and metadata to help them target advertising better. Just as they do with email.

I bought a recent Android phone and got given a heap of free dropbox space, I'm at 30.2Gb free now. Might be an option if you have a recent phone and haven't signed up to dropbox yet?

don't know if this is relevant to the use case as the thread has developed, but Amazon have just launched a new service called Glacier which is designed for long term archival and backup storage.

It's $0.01 per GB per month for storage, but retrieval takes up to 5 hours and retrieving above a certain percentage of your archive incurs a cost (which still seems to be pretty reasonable for occasional use). Basically the pricing model is designed to encourage use for long term storage of stuff you almost never access, but want to know is safe if you ever need it.

AFAIK there are no clients available yet, but could really make the cloud more attractive for long term disaster recovery backups.

BTW just in case anyone doesn't know, Dropbox uses Amazon S3 under the hood. From what I've seen, that's a very good thing.