Free Cloud Storage for Classic Radio Fans

pCloud: still great, but not as "free" as it used to be, but the lifetime account can be a bargain

pCloud remains very popular. Their previously generous 10GB free account that you could build up to 20GB is no longer around. They say they have a free 10GB account, but you have to engage in a variety of activities to get it up that far. You can add more by getting others to join and some other activities you may not want to do, like setting up your automatic PC backup to use the site. The bottom line is that the company has their target number of users and growth rates, so they are much less aggressive using free space as their promotion. 

Their paid service, is still excellent, but can occasionally be slow. Sharing files is very easy, and their interface is very easy to understand once you get a little bit of experience with it. There are so many collectors on projects I am involved in that it seems pCloud has become the hobby standard. Sharing files is very easy, and it's also easy to copy files from a link to another user's account into yours. It's just seconds and it's all copied into your account.

They started an industry trend is their paid "lifetime" 2TB account that now sells for $399. In recent years, the "lifetime" pcloud 2TB Black Friday special was $245. It is worth waiting for. The best way to get it is to open a free account to be sure you get this promotion. (A word to the wise... if you're an older collector, have a younger family member become the "lifetime" account holder -- so it lasts longer for someone... in 10 years we may scoff at 2TB like it was a floppy disk... but keep in mind that when it says "lifetime" pick someone with the likelihood of a longer one). 

The lifetime deals have become so popular that pCloud has expanded their offerings in the category. At one time, 2TB was the maximum size, and then it was increased to 4TB. If you wanted more, you have to correspond with customer service. Now, you can ADD as much as 10TB to your existing account. So my 2TB has already become 12TB if I wanted it to. 

Mega

Mega is actually one of the oldest and biggest cloud storage companies, with 290 million accounts. That's about 15x the size of pCloud's user base. When Degoo (mentioned below) was giving me problems when I was posting things at Cobalt Club, I tried a few different offerings, and settled on Mega. It is fast, has a great interface, and you get 20GB in a free account. The company does not offer lifetime accounts. Pricing is comparable with Dropbox.

WeTransfer: great choice for one-time transfers

For something that only needs a short time of exposure, WeTransfer is excellent, and has been getting better. So if you're sending a bunch of files that don't need permanent online storage, this is the way to go. Up to 2GB per transmission. The files are available for 7 days, which means you don't clutter your permanent cloud storage with all kinds of files that are no longer needed. Highly reliable. Their paid service prices are very attractive, but they do not have a lifetime account. WeTransfer does not require you to have an account to send files, but the way their menus work, it makes it seem like they do. There's no need to go through any sign-up process to send a file over the service.

There are alternatives to WeTransfer. Some require you to sign up for an account or supply your e-mail address. These two alternative do not require that, and you can just get a link like WeTransfer does.

• pCloud also has a transfer service at https://transfer.pcloud.com/ that allows transfer of 5GB without having an account.  Links are active for 7 days.

• filetransfer.io at https://filetransfer.io/ is similar to WeTransfer and allows 6GB and links last 21 days.

IceDrive is an excellent provider few seem to know about

IceDrive offers 10GB of free space to new users. Click here for the home page. It has a remarkably clean interface. It's well designed, and easy to use, and worth the try! The service is highly recommended and its lifetime prices are lower than pCloud. It always gets superb reviews.

Filen.io

You've never heard of this one before! Go to https://filen.io/pro and get 10GB free space. They actually have a "starter" lifetime account of 100GB that i paid just $30. That does not seem to be offered any longer, and they now have 200GB for Euro55. Ed Wynn used to say he had an 11 ft pole for things he would not touch with a 10 ft pole. I look at Filen this way: if I have something I want to share with many people, and I don't want the traffic on my primary cloud accounts, I use filen.io. The service has been excellent, and I even had a tech support question that was responded to promptly. It has a great and simple interface. (If you use this link for an account, we each have our accounts get an additional 10GB; this means your free Filen account will be 20GB -- at least I think that's the way it all works!)

Google Drive: if you have GMail, you already have Drive

There's always Google Drive -- each gmail acct gets 15GB storage on Drive -- perhaps it's worth getting a new gmail account for that space? -- for me it has been. Google Drive is where my Suspense research page links and others are being stored. While I like applications like Google Sites and Google Sheet, Google Drive as a storage is a bit clunky, but it does come in handy now and then. You can buy access to extra space under a plan called "Google One." If you don't have a gmail account, get one, just for having a backup email account, and get your free 15GB in Google Drive. I use that service to build webpages like this because I can't figure out any of the other online website building alternatives :)

Blomp

Blomp is a relatively new service that offers 20GB for a free account and then another 20GB for each person you invite. The invites have to be by email; there is no generic link that earns you the extra space. You can work your way up to 200GB! You can only invite 9 people into that promotion. If you want to be one of those people, send me an email at suspenseotr@gmail.com and we can go "blomping" together! They now require you to log in once a month, if I read it correctly, to keep your free account.

Box

I love Box. It's got a very clean interface, and I used it a lot when I was in business. There's free space there to be had, but the download limits are very tight. It's a superb cloud service, but not really applicable to what OTR collectors need. If you use cloud services in a business, your best choices are pCloud and Box, in my opinion. But for the classic radio hobby, it's not a comfortable fit.

Microsoft OneDrive

Microsoft OneDrive has free accounts with 5GB, recently cut back from 15GB. If you have a subscription to Microsoft Office, 1TB of OneDrive space comes with it. That "free" 1TB stops if you stop your Office subscription. That would sent it back to 5GB. OneDrive's interface is set up more to support use of documents, presentations, and photos. It sometimes seems slow. You may have OneDrive and not be aware of it! Check your Microsoft Office installation for more details. The biggest problem with OneDrive is that it really does not work well with Mac users who do not use Microsoft Office. I've stopped using it for any radio recordings that I expect to share with others. So it's just another backup cloud service for me, and not one that facilitates my hobby activities.

OneDrive can be a bargain for familes that have Office365 subscriptions. For $100 per year, you can have MS Office for 2 to 6 persons, each with a 1TB OneDrive account. The personal account is $70, so for just $30 more, you theoretically have  6TB of space and all of Microsoft's office applications. As collector Gordon  Johansen reminded me of this on the OTRR groups.io page, this makes this the biggest bargain for storage. If, however, you don't use Microsoft's products (I use the open source office suite LibreOffice, but we still have a Microsoft account because not everyone in the family likes LibreOffice), it still may be worth it. The most common price for 2TB of cloud storage space on an annual basis is $100. So you end up with 4TB more and get the full MSOffice suite of programs.

Sync

Sync had become a favorite at Cobalt Club, but the service now limits you to three file share links -- EVER!!! Its prices are a bit high, but it has been reliable. It's not good for sharing a lot of files any more, but everyone can find a use for backing of 5GB of something, and you can build the 5GB up with referrals. The business reviews of Sync are superb, but it's not a good fit for us hobbyists.

Degoo -- What a deal! But then it's not...

There is another service that is not well-known yet, Degoo. You get a whopping 100GB of space and for each person you invite, you get 5GB more space, and they do, too! You can build that up to 500GB of free space with enough referrals and other actions. Degoo was getting very good reviews on the tech sites. If you use this link https://cloud.degoo.com/drive-ahu-hkrzwn7n we each get 5GB more space.

When you sign up you are offered pro and business or something like that, and then below them in small print is "continue with free" -- and then it is pretty straightforward. When you are in the "my files" page, to get to a shareable link you have to click on the file and have it start playing (that is annoying) and in the lower left corner is the share button where you can get the link you need for that file. The service works, just a few different clicking patterns compared to the others.

So if you are able, use this link https://cloud.degoo.com/drive-ahu-hkrzwn7n to get a free account and add to the space that we use to support the OTR hobby and its research and keep it active and thriving. This is an incredible deal, and you have to think that the company will reduce it at some point once they hit a target number of users. Their paid prices seem very competitive. 

All that said, Degoo is better for backing up your own files. Sharing can be a problem, especially if you are going to be posting a link that many people will use. Your bandwidth can suddenly disappear and no one can download anything. The interface is mainly designed for sharing photos. With so many better deals, you may want to try something else. They're no running a deal of 10TB for $99.  If there are files you need to hide away as an emergency backup, it's worth it -- a 1TB external drive sells for around $70 nowadays.

MediaFire

MediaFire is still around, and the pop-up ads are nowhere as near as bad or security threatening as they used to be. This doesn't mean that there's no clickbait issues. The service seems a lot faster than it used to be. Again, if you have an old MediaFire account, it may be time to explore it again. New users get 10GB of free space; and there are no lifetime accounts. The company does try to entice you to upgrade with various hurdles to enable certain functions related to sizes of files you can send and such.  With so many great alternatives, MediaFire is not a compelling offering for new users.

ThunderDrive.io

This service gets very aggressive in its lifetime storage promotions with some almost unbelievable pricing in special offers. You can get lifetime 2TB for $59 with a promo code, a 95% discount off their regular pricing. The service gets very poor reviews in computer publications. There are better choices noted above. The company seems to have a related operation, PrismDrive, that also receives weak reviews.