I am a big fan of the cloud. While I appreciate local storage and privacy/control/security, etc., that stuff can also go away locally. Plus, I like the convenience, and I think that many cloud services do a good job of making my life easier.
That being said, I’ve had a few things in place for the last few years.
- Dropbox – files, sharing photos/video, presentations
- Google Workspace – personal email, photos, docs/sheets
- Amazon Photos – extra photo backup (free with Prime)
- OneDrive – personal and business, syncing files
- GitHub – repos of misc stuff.
- BackBlaze – laptop/desktop backup
- Notes – Joplin through DropBox
- Passwords – Password Safe through OneDrive.
I have a few other minor things, but this is where I have a lot of stuff.
Recently I’ve been thinking that I need to consolidate a few things. Partially because of cost. Like 37 Signals, I realized that I was spending more than I’d like on a few things, and I’ve decided to try and reduce costs, but not reduce service.
Leaving DropBox
I’ve been paying for 1TB of space in Dropbox. I’ve also had 1TB in OneDrive. I essentially flipped a mental coin and decided to stick with Microsoft, partially because a lot of my work involves MS, and I have a number of things linked to a personal MS account where I use my OneDrive.
I was only using about 20GB of space in DropBox, so this was an easy move for me. I dragged/dropped a bunch of things from one folder to another and let them sync. I cancelled the $10/mo for DropBox and I’ve reduced some cloud spend.
As a second backup, I’m going to start moving more of my talks to GitHub, keeping presentations there, along with copies in OneDrive, as this will ensure I have a couple backups in the event of some disaster.
Photos
I ran out of space in my Google Workspace for photos. I share this with my kids, and the plans to expand space are poor for an individual. They are geared to businesses, and adding more space would take my $18/mo plan to $60, which seems like a crazy indulgence.
For now, I’ve started using OneDrive as my backup for photos, still with Amazon, and I’ve kicked the can on this as my daughter is in her final year of Uni and doesn’t want to deal with any migrations.
Notes
I wrote about moving to Joplin from Evernote awhile back. It’s worked well, but I was synching things through DropBox. I had to move that to OneNote and it works well.
I saw a few people at work using other services, and I might investigate them, but for now, Joplin has worked well.
I still don’t like OneNote and prefer text or MD formats.
Email/Docs
Like the photos above, I’ve got a lot of stuff in Google, but they haven’t made it easy to manage. A lot of Google services are either personal or business, and there’s no crossover. For example, I can’t use Google Pay with my workspace account because, well Google has different divisions and they don’t talk.
I want to migrate my personal domain away, but for now, I don’t have a good plan, I’m sticking with Google and I’ll decide in the summer what to do.
Backup
Backblaze has been great for me. They’ve raised prices a few times, but I’m OK with that. I want a raise most years, so I’m fine with reasonable price increases.
Passwords
We have a service at work for passwords, but I’ve been hesitant to move to it. It syncs to the cloud and provides automatic entry into browsers and things, but I’ve been used to Password Safe and I am hesitant to change. I like having my own safes for passwords that I can manage the synching of through a choices of file sharing. Too many third parties have had breaches, and I worry that my personal file storage is less likely to be targeted than a third party managing passwords for corporations.
I’m sticking with Password Safe, syncing through OneDrive.
Summary
I love the cloud, but I’d be curious if any of you use/recommend/hate different services.