Which Cloud Storage Service Should I Use to Share and Receive Files Externally?
This week’s question for Lifehacker’s tech-advice column comes from Nate . While his query has a bit of a business theme, it still applies to anyone who doesn’t like paying a ton of money for cloud storage – so everyone.
A Lifehacker reader asks:
“As a small business owner, I am constantly faced with the problem of customers and their cloud storage systems. Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, etc. This creates a pretty big headache to find everything, and it also gets quite expensive to maintain a subscription to all of these different platforms. How would you propose to combine everything into one main platform, while still making it convenient for my clients? “
Before I get to my answer, a little note. We’re heading towards the end of the year for the Lifehacker tech column, Tech 911 , and the mailbag looks like the inverse of Santa’s bag – that is, please send me any and all tech-related questions you have , especially if they are related to things. that you received (or are about to buy for yourself) this holiday season. I’m here to help you! Let me help you.
Doctor’s advice:
This may sound like a silly comment, but here’s the thing: If the customers are the ones with all the different online storage systems, why are you paying for different subscriptions? It’s not like you’re buying an “unlimited” Google account, for example, which lets you store whatever you want on another company’s Google Drive. The said company manages and pays for the storage and creates user accounts for others to access as they see fit.
Of course, the company can do just that and pass the money on to you – starting at $ 10 in my example – which will better explain your letter. If all of your customers have different cloud services and charge you for a separate account for each, it adds up.
Assuming you can convince your customers to adopt a new file management solution – which could involve taking the results out of their control (their cloud storage) and storing them in the solution you customized – then I agree that it makes the most sense to consolidate everything you do for one service, instead of having to deal with multiple services at the same time.
If you’re more comfortable dealing with a more manual approach, you can always pick a great NAS box – a network-attached storage device – and use that to host your data. It shouldn’t be that hard to set up user accounts for your customers and run some kind of online portal that they can use to view, upload and download files. (Or you can give them access to a simple FTP server if you like.) You can also set up your own dedicated server, but it’s a little more complicated than a NAS box.
If you’d rather not mess with any of this and just use the cloud service, which will probably guarantee you much more uptime since you’ll have fewer times when you lose your internet connection at the office, you need to upgrade your NAS. device. etc. – you have a huge number of options to choose from. I’ve previously looked at some of the common cloud computing options for consumers , but small business cloud storage (and its cost) is a different matter entirely.
Google G Suite can work, which starts at $ 5 per user for a shared pool of 30 GB of cloud storage, or $ 10 per user for unlimited storage (if you have more than five users; 1 TB per user if you have less than five). If you want other users to be able to freely upload and download files in your cloud, you need to create accounts for them, otherwise they can just download the files. This can be costly and will not solve the cost problem that you indicated in your letter.
You can also check out Dropbox’s offerings. For the cheapest business plan – $ 450 a year – you get up to three user accounts and 3 TB of shared storage. You can reuse these user licenses as you see fit (as clients come and go), and you can give your clients the ability to access and download shared folders. (And they can send you something new using the file request feature, or they can sign up for a free Dropbox account on their own as long as they don’t go over the free 2GB limit.)
Heck, you can even just use the cheaper personal Dropbox account if you don’t need those additional users. And while you’re at it, be sure to check out DBinbox , which you can use to make a super-easy “upload here” form for your clients.
I’m not that familiar with the Microsoft SharePoint Online offering ($ 10 per user / month for unlimited storage), but you should be able to share folders with external clients – and they can then download or upload whatever they want. I believe they will need to create a Microsoft account to do this, but that seems to be the only major limitation? If I don’t fully understand this, you can get by with one SharePoint Online account and grant access to as many external users as you like.
You can also just transfer files back and forth through a service like MASV if you send archives of draft and finished work to each other. It’s less helpful if each client just wants to have a folder they can refer to, filled with everything you’ve worked on together: old and new projects, invoices, illustrations, documents, spreadsheets, etc. Similarly, there is Hightail – also worth considering, with the same restrictions.
These are several options I can think of. Unfortunately, cloud storage can be expensive no matter how you do it. And I find that cheaper solutions tend to cause more headaches or worse, can be much slower than big names like Google, Dropbox, etc. However, hopefully one of these works suits you. Post an answer and let me know what you chose (or if you need a little more guidance!)