Free cloud storage has drawbacks

Cloud computing is a dramatic rethink of how we work with technology. We’re only starting to explore its potential.

Much of the focus of cloud to date has been on business and enterprise customers, but there are cloud vendors targeting small businesses and individuals. The promise is that cloud computing allows to get through more work while using fewer resources.

Thanks to the cloud we can work on the same documents using a PC, iPad or smartphone. It doesn’t matter where we are, all that's needed is a decent net connection.

Free storage

Cloud computing isn’t expensive. Many popular services for individuals are free. That’s where things get silly.

I have an HTC Smartphone, it comes with 26.5GB of free Dropbox storage. Microsoft is almost as generous, there’s 25GB to play with in my SkyDrive account. I have another 5GB of free cloud storage at Google Drive and 5GB at Apple’s iCloud. There’s also 60MB with my free Evernote account. There may be other subscriptions with cloud storage that I’ve forgotten about.

The list above adds up to a total of 60GB; none of it costs me a penny. As I’ve pointed out before sometimes free is too high a price.

Looking a gift horse in the mouth?

While this may sound great, it isn’t trouble free. Each service installs apps on each device. Each one of them syncs data. Often.

Collectively they chew bandwidth and slow other online applications. There are times when a backup is in progress and you need something in a hurry.

There’s also a lock-in.

Google, Microsoft and Apple cloud services integrate tightly with other products from those companies. Although documents can move between, say, Google Docs and Microsoft Word, the process is not seamless.