Do you pay for Cloud Storage?

General Chat
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I currently pay for Dropbox Professional at US$199 (or £147. I have a Dropbox account under the US$ billing system because it is a legacy account so I am not charged at the £199 price point). I pay for the Professional tier for the SmartSync really.

I try to minimalise paper from my life, so I scan every paper document I receive. I store formal documents such as birth certificates, and shred the rest. I have also started to backup most files I would use on my computer - super trusting the cloud with unimportant things - and using Boxcryptor file encryption within Dropbox, for the rest.

I also use it to transfer things between my work laptop and my personal computer (using Boxcryptor to encrypt sensitive documents). However because of GDPR, the IT guy at my school wants to disable Dropbox and only allow Tresorit due to end-to-end encryption and other things wrong with Dropbox in the past. The professional version of this is well over £200 so would significantly increase my cloud payments. I am currently trying it out though as my annuel Dropbox payment is due soon.

I also pay 79p per month for the lowest iCloud because I have all my historical and current photos in Apple Photos so need a bit of extra space.

44

Do try - they’re surprisingly intuitive.

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45

I envy you for this! As a foreigner in this country I cannot afford this (see Windrush), and thus store every piece of paper with my name on it, and actively opt in to paper statements/correspondence whereever I can. Everything gets scanned and uploaded to Google Drive (I pay for the 100GB tier, but will need to upgrade soon, as I’m beginning to run out of space) for save keeping in case of fire or similar, before it’s carefully filed away. I may be a bit paranoid, but I have amassed an archive of 1000s of pages of paper over the last few years…

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46

Why?

actively opt in to paper statements/correspondence whereever I can.

WTF. :joy:

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Home office wants Sh** load of hard paper if someone from another country wants to apply for Permanent residence or Indefinite leave to remain here in UK. An EU national whose partner is a non-EU national will need even more. Both person applying are required to prove your relationship is ‘real’, you have been working for past 5 years and have not had any benefits etc…

Home office can just not be trusted to make logical decisions anyone applying have to have every piece of evidence just in case…

Govt. has been promising this will change so this will soon be a different process and people can get rid of paper.

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48

@SC95 has answered it quite well. I just recently applied for a “Permanent Residence Card for an EEA Citizien” and sent in 100s of pages of paper: For each applicant they want as a minimum 2 (better 4) different proofs of address for each year you spent in the UK. These mustn’t be printed off the internet, so that’s why I need paper. (Of course you could try it anyway, and expect noone to notice. But keep in mind that making false claims in such an application is a criminal offence - and claiming a document is “original” when it is in fact printed off the internet is a false claim.)

And sadly, there is precedent for this causing massive problems decades later: Windrush. While the main reason for this abject failure was utter incompetence at the Home Office, it could’ve been alleviated if those concerned had kept every document with their name on, since arriving in the UK: In a nutshell they needed documents proving they lived in the UK continuously going back to the 1970s. In practice that meant that the HO asked for multiple pieces of “proof of address” per year, going back almost 50 years (E.g a bank statement + a payslip + a utility bill + a letter from HMRC). Of course noone had those! Keep in mind that the situation of the Windrush Generation is very similar to that of EU citizens, in that there is no documentation for those involved. The same thing can affect us in 50 years time.

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49

@Jhzaeth have you a contingency if the lights go out, so to speak?

50

@CTE This will always be the issue when building our lives around technology.

In order to not have access to my documents (for example), I would have to be unlucky enough to: i) not have my phone/be out of battery, ii) not have access to any computer that allows access to dropbox - or the dropbox servers are down/data is lost.

My home computer is a laptop which would work should there be a power outage, and the outage is protracted enough to where my phone/laptop run out of battery, but I’m desperate, there is typically some public place nearby I can go to to charge my stuff (coffee shop, work). If the outage is, let’s say, national, and I’m desperate, then I can go to a place with a generator (my work) to charge things.

In the other situation (dropbox servers down/data lost), then there won’t be much that I can do. However I consider both server outage and data loss by dropbox unlikely. Dropbox is quite safe, but there are other, safer, cloud services available. Right now dropbox offers the right balance of usability and security for my needs. I try to keep an eye on tech news and can always move my data to another cloud server if the need arises in future.

I still have a small folder with my absolute essentials (passport, birth certificate, wedding certificate etc) so I’d have the contingency.

If we’re talking about an end-of-the-world contingency - no electricity, no internet, servers down globally, terminators coming - then my online documents will be the least of my concerns.
:wink:

Tl;dr - I have a few contingencies but rely on the fact that in this day and age, with our reliance on technology, in the limited situations where there is no hope, access to my data will be the least of my concerns.

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51

Recently got myself onto GSuite for £6ish a month for unlimited storage, with an added bonus of all the business features too! You’re meant to have atleast 5 users but they don’t check… could split the cost with 5 people though for unlimited storage?

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Dropbox users who pay monthly, do you find that your payments just don’t play well with Monzo? A quick search of my feed and it looks like this. I know I can just submit for these to be corrected every month but surely there’s a better way to solve this permanently and save Monzo’s time approving these from hundreds of customers?

My personal favourite out of these is the one where the logo was applied but the name wasn’t updated :man_facepalming:t5:

Screenshot_20190809-190814_Monzo
Screenshot_20190809-190814_Monzo.jpg1440×2960 450 KB

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Currently, £0.79 for 50Gb iCloud, but I’m considering the option £2.49 for family sharing with my partner as we both us MacBooks and iPhones.

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I ditched my Dropbox paid plan when they upped the cost. Pay £2.50 for iCloud, and have free Dropbox for when I need to have shared folders

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55

Shared Folders is finally coming with iOS 13.

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56

I saw! Looking forward to that

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I use O Drive and combine free accounts.

I have 15GB on One Drive (grandfathered plan), 15GB Google Drive, 8.75GB (for some reason) on Drop Box, 50GB Box.com

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I pay monthly but not via Monzo.

The credit card I pay from shows the following for each transaction:
DROPBOX * ############

Where ############ represents the code you’re seeing which changes every month.

Emma (the account aggregator) seems to be able to cope with the weirdness. It just shows “Dropbox” in its transaction list:

Dropbox%20in%20Emma
Dropbox in Emma.png750×1334 81 KB

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59

I find the 15GB from Google enough for personal use. At work we get 1TB OneDrive.

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60

Which is why I’ve ditched ‘paid’ Dropbox and moved to ‘Files’ in iOS now. Saving me a few quid a month!

61

I have a 2TB GDrive running at approx. £6.66 per month. For what is stores, I can’t fault it for that price.

62

I pay for 100GB Google Drive (general document store), 200GB iCloud (photos) and I get a free TB of One Drive with my Office 365.

I would probably just pay for 2TB if Google One if they supported G Suite accounts but Google are useless at supporting non personal accounts.

I haven’t bought an actual hard drive in years so I feel like spending money on cloud storage is pretty fair. I also like the idea of offloading the maintenance hassle to someone else but I should probably have a better backup strategy as in the back of my mind I know that storage does not equal backup.

If you’re looking for the cheapest deal than Office 365 is the way to go. You can get a 5 user one year pack for about £60 which comes with a free TB of One Drive for each user. Absolutely bargaintastic value when you consider that it comes with the full Office apps too.

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