Recently I was looking into a position as a campus rep for Microsoft SkyDrive, which got me curious about what SkyDrive actually is. SkyDrive is Microsoft's venture into cloud storage, similar to iCloud or Dropbox. I proceeded to download the application onto my computer and my iPhone to test it out. I am always moving photos from my computer to my iPhone (usually because I want to put them into Instagram) and I usually just email them to myself and then open the email on my phone. I have to say that (although it's not much of a surprise since emailing them is obviously probably not the quickest way of doing this) I was really happy with how quickly my photos synced to my iPhone when using Microsoft SkyDrive.
It seemed kind of silly that I was using a Microsoft application on my Apple phone, when Apple has it's own version that is supposed to do the same thing, and so I got kind of curious about the differences between SkyDrive and the other top cloud applications and found an informative article comparing it to iCloud, Dropbox, and Google Drive.
It seemed to me like the real pro about using SkyDrive is that it came with 7GB of free space, while iCloud and Google Drive only give 5GB free and Dropbox offers only a measly 2GB. The yearly cost for 100GB was also cheaper for SkyDrive than for the other three. I found SkyDrive to be extremely easy to use, but I will probably try out iCloud soon and see if it works better, since I am working on an Apple phone.
Check out the article here if you'd like to see which cloud application best suits you, or just to see the comparisons in more detail:
Cloud Storage Comparison Review
Thanks for the comparison, I didn't know much about SkyDrive, so it was interesting to hear.
ReplyDeleteCloud storage is definitely super-convenient.
As a counterpoint, I will just mention two drawbacks to cloud storage:
1. Upload and Download speeds: If working on a large multimedia project, having to upload and download your project can eat up a lot of valuable time. Local storage (USB or even better Firewire) will be much faster.
2. Security. Having to rely on a password stored in a database somewhere opens you up to a lot of threats. For instance, I use Evernote for storing notes and documents on the go, but recently found out they had been hacked and suggested all of their users reset their passwords. This has also happened to me on LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc. Looking forward to 5 years out when we have touch screens that recognize your fingerprint for your "password".