Solving Your Personal Digital Storage Problem

This goes without saying, but we have mountains of digital information and it’s an issue that businesses struggle to manage properly. Individuals must do the same.

Some of the volumes of info can range from vacation pictures to important documents to website content and various types of contracts.

In the past when we stored things, the formats were, let’s say, less than desirable. Do you remember floppy disks? How about plain disks? If you remember, there were also CDs, which we used to burn our pictures and/or music onto.

As time went on, we developed portable hard drives. This is still a great option. You can get a lot of storage for a little bit of price, and you maintain control.

These days there are cloud storage applications and services. This article will discuss three good options, but to be sure, there are several different kinds of services.

As an aside, David Hinson recommends using two-step authentication when using cloud storage services.

Dropbox
Dropbox is a favorite of many different users. In fact, over 400 million people use Dropbox. The company has often been mentioned in growth hacking circles because of its use of referrals to gain sign-ups. Dropbox rewards users with more space for referring a friend who signs up.

The company was founded in June 2007.

A free account gets you 2GB of storage and it provides desktop and mobile apps to help sync your files. The company has set up a website to show how users can use Dropbox.

One of the positives for Dropbox is the wide array of integrations with several third parties.

Box
Box seems like the new player because of the extreme popularity of Dropbox, but it is actually older. The company was started in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith. The company boasts over 37 million users and 47,000 organizations and around 50% of the Fortune 500.

Recently, Box announced incentives for startups to join forces to use its platforms.

The free personal plan comes with 10GB of storage. Box also offers very reasonable storage plans for businesses.

Google Drive
This may come as a surprise to many, but Google Drive gives you tons of room to store files. Your account comes with 15GB of storage. For $9.99 per month you can get 1TB. Google Drive is already connected to your Google account allowing you to use the various document applications, Gmail and other great features by Google.

Between these three services, for free, you can store up to 27GB of information and files. The good thing is that each of these storage services have a great amount of flexibility, come with tools for integration and include various applications to sync files across multiple devices.

One of the things I collect are ebooks. I sign up for email newsletters to get an ebook so that I can learn more about a subject, and sometimes I buy ebooks. This is a terrific way to store my ebooks and then access them from my laptop, my Android phone and my Kindle Fire.

In addition, any of my music can be stored here as well. Further, the price points for extra storage are very reasonable. These are great solutions for a small- or medium-sized business or a startup that is running lean.

How do you use storage for your files and documents?