There are so many options to choose from!
Don’t you hate it when you run out of storage space on your hard drive? To be honest, I’m having that exact problem right now! I do video work for my company and video editing on Final Cut Pro takes up A LOT of storage space on my computer. This week, I took a look at the various cloud storage options to choose from. Let’s take a look at a couple of options to compare.
I wanted to compare the two cloud storage options that I found would be best for video: Google Drive and Dropbox. According to this comparison article on Cnet, Google Drive has the most for a free storage option with 15GB. This is great for someone on a budget. However, with a paid plan, the price goes up as we increase our storage space. Therefore, 100GB of storage would be $2 a month, 200 GB would be $3 a month, 2TB would be $10 a month, and so on. In comparison, Dropbox does not have as much free storage as Google Drive, offering only 2GB. Once we get into paid plans, 3TB of storage costs up to $20 a month. Dropbox also has the option to have a space for teams (not just individuals) on Dropbox Business, which is $12.50 a month for 5TB of space.
As far as ease of use, Google Drive has its own word processor, a spreadsheet application, and presentation builder (Google’s versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), so managing files on Google Drive is very easy. You can drag your files from your hard drive to Google Drive and organize them in various folders. The 15GB you get for free are for anything you upload to the drive including photos and video files. Using Dropbox is also very simple, just like Google Drive. Easily drag all of your files to Dropbox and they are saved within the cloud storage space. The easiest part of having Dropbox is that you can simply share and collaborate with others and they do not even have to have a Dropbox account to edit or view the files you share with them.
As far as personal likes and dislikes, what I like about both Google Drive and Dropbox is the ease of sharing files with others for instant collaboration. From my experience, the upload time to Google Drive was fast, which is something I appreciate. Uploading videos can take time and with Google Drive, it was a piece of cake. However, a dislike I have with Dropbox is that I have uploaded videos to the platform before, and sometimes it would take hours (depending on the WiFi stability) to upload one video.
There are specific aspects I personally need in a cloud storage service. I’m looking for one that is good for video work and I use a Mac so it needs to be Mac compatible. After comparing the two services above, I think I would choose Google Drive. The upload time alone is what sold me. While it’s good that Dropbox has its own built-in media player, I am on a budget and it doesn’t give as much free storage space as Google Drive. While 15GB isn’t enough to save too many video files, I would need to eventually switch to a paid plan. However, even if I were to pay for storage, Google Drive is cheaper compared to Dropbox (for the same 2TB of storage, the Dropbox price per year is $119.88 versus the $99.99 per year for Google Drive, according to this article on Cloudwards). I'm a Google user as well and have a Gmail account already, so it would be the easiest transition instead of starting a whole new Dropbox account. While there are so many options to choose from for storage space, you can easily find the best one right for you and your needs.
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