Sharepoint cloud storage

[Hector Vera]

Well I have been archiving all sorts of files, especially many of my video files on Dropbox for a several years now and so far all my files were pretty safe there and encrypted. Always good to have a 2FA on your Dropbox account so hackers does not easily have access to your account. Always use common sense and avoid sharing others personal details, keep them private in your cloud storage but when it comes to backing up files offline when internet is not around, external offline drives are still the way to go! 🙂 Dropbox is convenient cause I can check my files easily on my smartphone any time, anywhere. 🙂 Hope this helps!

[Tom Morton]

Ha! I’ve been there and done this!

I know there’s a lot of mixed views on this subject but I’ve tried several solutions and looked at more. I do a lot of video editing and I initially kept everything on hard drives – fast and handy, but to be honest it’s a pain to work projects are where. I basically outgrew the hard drives school of thought when I was hot-swapping between 5 external drives and a couple of internal drives and running out of space. Also I maintain the school of thought that hard drives WILL fail, sometime. It’s when, not if.

So since then I tried out Sharepoint, Onedrive, DropBox and Google Drive. All are ok, but as soon as you start storing TB’s of files, the pricing becomes very flaky. I also looked into AWS, Azure and Google GCP. They’re all ok and not to bad on pricing but much higher skill level to maintain and manage appropriately.

For the last few years I’ve settled down to a hybrid solution which works fairly well. I have a couple of decent internal drives in Raid1, and then I use box.com for backup and offline storage. 2 reasons I use Box.com:

– They have an unlimited data plan for a very reasonable price.

– They offer an older software client that allows you to download / sync folders to a specified location instead of your C drive.

So my hard drives are backed up entirely into box.com, and I have just have the latest projects synced at any time. Once a project is done with, I unsync it and it lives on the cloud. This has the added benefit that it’s very easy to work on an old project – just sync it again and begin working! Keeping the same drive letter means no broken links either.

Another benefit is the Box.com search is very good – really fast, I can search through 8 years and 25 TB of files in just a couple of seconds, and it’s available on the web, via FTP and the phone app which seems reliable.

Fingers crossed, no reason to change yet! Nothing else I’ve tried has really worked, unless I’m prepared to invest big bucks into a industrial level NAS (if you want a NAS, do not cut costs, even expensive ones are naff) or a turnkey cloud solution designed for this.

Let us know what you do, all the best!

[Tom Morton]

PS: don’t touch sharepoint unless you have to. Although secure, it’s a pig to work with, extra storage space is expensive if you need it, and any mainstream cloud storage brand will give you better control in a simpler and more intuitive way.