Dropbox Replacement: Comparion of Online Storage

Submitted by mk on 2 September, 2011 - 23:18

Dropbox is very good online storage service. The free 2GB is never enough and everybody need to find the way to expand it via invitation scheme. I'm too lazy for that and I'm willing to pay. However, the "pro" package, 50GB for $99/year, is too expensive. I can pay $20/year for 20GB but no such package exists.

So this afternoon I dig down almost every online storage services to find the best "Dropbox replacement". My criteria are:

  • the price of storage unit (per GB)
  • the minimum package per year (the actual amount of money we customer will pay)
  • platform support (In my case, Linux & Android are required) The result is comparison table embedded below (sorted by price/GB/year):

Some quick remarks:

  • We need to choose between the unlimited approach (start at $50/year) or data limited package (start at $20/year). Pay-as-you-go can be another choice in JungleDisk case.
  • The cheapest service, in term of price/GB/year is iDrive. Followed by Memopal, Amazon Cloud Drive, SpiderOak
  • The cheapest data-limited package is Amazon Cloud Drive ($20/year). Apple iCloud is also $20 but it's still in developer preview (and expensive cost per GB). The others are CrashPlan ($25) and Ubuntu One ($29)

The best option for me seems to be Memopal. Will try the free 3GB first so I can tell whether it is really good or not.

If you are kind enough, you can try Memopal via my referral link. Both of us will get 500MB additional storage.

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Comments

fatro

3 September, 2011 - 21:00

> However, the "pro" package, 50GB for $50/year

should be "50GB for $99/year" because $50/yr is acceptable for me :)

mk

4 September, 2011 - 00:37

Ok. fixed.

Chris

4 September, 2011 - 01:10

Backblaze, Crashplan, and Carbonite are all backup services rather than online storage. AFAIK you can't sync files across multiple devices like with Dropbox. (I am using Crashplan for backup, personally. I don't think they have Android app.)

I've tried SpiderOak for syncing between Ubuntu and a Windows 7 machine for 2 months and was not impressed. It was much more configurable than Dropbox, which I thought was a good thing. But I ended up having to spend so much time tweaking, monitoring, and making sure files are indeed synced, which is very different from the "install it and forget it" of Dropbox.

mk

4 September, 2011 - 17:52

@chris:

I agree with you on the difference of service so I also put them into another sections.

I think the best solution might be a combination of a paid backup service & free Dropbox for sharing.

thanr

5 September, 2011 - 09:48

From the table, Memopal is coming out surprisingly nice, will give it a spin soon!

Chris

6 September, 2011 - 12:55

I agree, and that's what I'm doing.

And if you use the referral to get free dropbox space up near the 8GB limit, I think it's quite spacious. (Although it might be a bit hard to find potential users who are not already using it)

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