Price for additional storage space
vary a lot between these services, but none are as high as iCloud’s
Handing your personal and/or business data over to another company for storing online
obviously raises some questions. Each cloud operator has its own terms and
conditions, which invariably assure you that their staff will never be
permitted to read your documents or to gather any information from users’
uploads for their own commercial use. Your files will be password-protected to
keep them safe. Whether that’s sufficient to pacify your work IT department is
something you’ll have to ask them yourself.
While it’s tempting to look in the cloud
for the security risks, the weakest link is more likely your iPhone or iPad,
since the apps with which you use cloud services will often remain permanently
logged in to them for quick access. So, anyone who was able to pick up your
iPhone or iPad would probably be able to access your stored files. Habitually
logging out of your services is one answer, but a better one is to set the
Passcode Lock option in iOS and use a strong password, not the default
four-digit key, to protect your whole device.
Unfortunately, if you constantly put down
and pick up your mobile device as most of us do, this will seem soul-destroying
inconvenient at first, but it’s a habit well worth getting into.
iCloud is built into OS X and iOS, as well as apps like Mail and iPhoto, so it
works as soon as you set up a machine with your Apple ID. There’s no need to
install anything – you just turn on iCloud in System Preferences on your Mac or
Settings in iOS, and all your emails, contact details, photos and other types
of data that you tick are henceforth automatically uploaded into the cloud and
pushed out to all the other devices you’ve set up whenever any changes occur.
iCloud
is built into OS X and iOS, as well as apps like Mail and iPhoto, so it works
as soon as you set up a machine with your Apple ID
These other cloud services don’t have that
advantage, so you’ll need to spend a few minutes configuring them. Lets’ look
at how Dropbox works first, since that was the service that really got the
cloud storage bandwagon rolling and established the template that Google Drive,
SkyDrive and SugarSync all follow.
When you download the Dropbox app from
dropbox.com on your Mac, it creates a special Dropbox folder on your hard disk.
Be default, his is stored inside your home folder (the one with a little house
icon, labeled with your username), but you can choose to put it elsewhere if
you prefer. It behaves just like any other folder in the Finder, but any files
or folders that you drag onto it or save into it are uploaded into the cloud
and synced to any other Mac, PC or mobile device that also has Dropbox installed
on it with your login and the devices of any other Dropbox users you opt to
share a particular subfolder with.
Google Drive, SkyDrive and SugarSync all
work in essentially the same way, creating a special upload folder where you
can put any file or folder that you want to store and sync online. The
advantage of this approach is that you can put pretty much any type of file or
document into the upload folder Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, video
files, MP3, anything at all.
However, this does mean you may need to
reorganize folders on your hard disk to make sure all the files and folders you
want available via the cloud are in that upload folder (SkyDrive may even require
you to change the names of some folders, too). The honorable exception here is
SugarSync: it does create a special MySugarSync folder on your Mac’s hard disk
where you can store files that you want to upload into the cloud, but you can
also link other existing folders to your account, without having to actually
place them inside the MySugarSync folder.
You
can put pretty much any type of file or document into the upload folder – Word
documents, Excel spreadsheets, video files, MP3 on SkyDrive, Google Drive and
SugarSync
That’s a great feature one that Dropbox has
been promising for years, but still can’t quite seem to manage.
Once you’ve got one of these cloud storage services set up on your Mac, you’ll need
to do the same on all your iOS devices too. They all offer free apps that you
can download and install in a matter of seconds. For the most part, these all
work in essentially the same way, displaying a list of the files that are
stored in your cloud account and then allowing you to download individual files
so that you can view them or play them. The interface design varies from app to
app – I prefer the simple list view of the SkyDrive app to the multi-panel
interface of SugarSync, but that’s largely a matter of personal preference.
One bit advantage is that all these apps
will allow you to view and play a wide range of different file formats. This
means that you can view your Word documents or Excel spreadsheets on your
iPhone or iPad even if you don’t have any word processor or spreadsheet apps already
installed on it. However, you will need a suitable app, such as Pages or
QuickOffice if you want to go further and edit these documents as well.
Most of these apps will also allow you to
view photos and play music and video files directly. The only problem we
encountered during our tests was that the Google Drive app wouldn’t let us play
back audio files. That’s an odd oversight, but probably not a deal-breaker for
most users.
There’s one other way of getting at your
files. Like iCloud, all these services allow you to view and download your
files just by logging into their websites from any computer or mobile device.
This is a useful option when you’re away, as it means you can get at your files
using any computer that has internet access. And, in the case of SkyDrive and
Google Drive, this will also allow you to use the Microsoft or Google web apps
to create and edit documents online, even if you don’t have a suitable app
installed on the computer you’re using.
Only
connect: right-click any file or folder in your Dropbox and you can get an
instant link to share it with other users
