“I’ve been an Apple guy since forever,” Ben Lovejoy writes for 9to5Mac. “I bought the very first Macintosh back in 1984. My current mobile technology line-up is a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, 11-inch MacBook Air (now just a backup Mac), 9.7-inch iPad Pro and an iPhone SE. I’m all-in on Apple, and the ecosystem is a large part of that. Things may not always Just Work, but the Apple ecosystem gets closer to that than anyone else.”
“However, while I do make some use of iCloud, I’m not all-in on Apple’s cloud storage,” Lovejoy writes. “In this piece, I compare the main cloud services out there, and finally describe the mix-and-match approach I use to get what I consider to be the best of all worlds.”
Lovejoy writes, “My primary cloud storage service is a 1TB Dropbox account.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What’s your cloud storage choice?
Synology NAS. Host your own cloud, you don’t need to rent someone else’s.
I also don’t need to build my own car because its easier to go buy/rent/lease one instead. Kudos to you if you want to run your own cloud but 99.999% of the population will never want to do this. We like doing things the easy way and paying Apple a few bucks a months is far easier than running my own cloud service and worrying about security, etc. Not to mention you probably lost 98% of population when you mentioned the word “cloud” because they don’t know/don’t care.
iCloud works great for our family and we now have 14 various devices (iPhones, iPads, iMacs, Macbooks). It just keeps getting better and better each year and I’ve never suffered any serious issues all the way back to the days of MobileMe.
As a side note, we just brought my mother-in-law into the iPhone/ios world from her Samsung/Android POS she was using. I had a chance to use the Android-to-IOS migration tool and it was amazing how easy the process was to migrate photos, contacts, emails, text messages, etc, etc. And the back in was using iCloud to do the migration I’m pretty sure.
She’s had her new iPhone 7 plus for less than 24 hours and is blown away how much better iPhone/iOS/iCloud is that what she was using.
Is iCloud perfect? No, but its pretty damn close for my needs. Your mileage may vary of course.
Who says anything about building a car ????
Realist espouses ownership. You like renting. You have been convinced that renting is easier because that’s what Apple has told you. Have you ever used an NAS? Maybe you should do an honest comparison before pissing on a very reasonable suggestion.
It’s called an analogy. And unless you’ve been living under a rock you’d understand there is a thing called the services economy where the world is shifting. Do I buy my own groceries to cook my dinner or do tap an app and have food delivered to me? Do I buy a car or just tap on Uber to pick me up? Do I create my own cloud service or do I just use Apples?
Don’t take things so personally. It’s just a discussion and different strokes for different folks.
> It’s called an analogy.
Unfortunately, it is a very poor one.
Poor because you said “build” when Realist said “buy”.
And granted, this is validity in having a ‘rent vs buy’ discussion … but when someone already has purchased some 14-odd devices and is already DIY’ing their maintenance, the prospects of a +1 incremental addition shouldn’t be a huge impediment.
Synology NAS is a home network storage/media device you pay several hundreds of dollars for for massive space, RAID, etc. I considered this type of solution but I really don’t need more than 200GB storage and relying ONLY on locally owned storage has some nasty drawbacks. For example your home incurs a lightening strike that zaps many of your devices (happened to me). Or you local backup becomes corrupted or screwed up in some way preventing a restore (also happened). Many other things like fire, theft, security breach, or friend/family member goof up and poof your expensive NAS backup is worthless when you need it most.
Just have multiple backups in multiple places both locally and in cloud. Sort of pointless to argue what is “best”. Just have as many backup onprem and off-premed you can given your budget and time.
Isn’t paying for iCloud at the moment like giving Apple a cut of your payment to host your data on AWS or Google datacenters?
Yep and I am willing to pay for that because I trust Apple to just make it work. And I don’t have to hassle with security, data storage/loss, backup services, and a slew of other stuff.
Some people may want to build and maintain their own cloud services. Just like back in the day I liked to build my own computers. I don’t do that anymore because life is busy and it’s not worth my time.
Realist isn’t necessarily saying that a NAS is the solution for everyone. Dropbox and services like it are the solution for people who don’t care about security – which is most folks. Most people have given up on data security, saying something along the lines of “it’s inevitable-we’ll never have security – why fight it?”. But for security-conscious folks, the solution is a NAS because it’s a lot less likely to be hacked into than somebody’s Dropbox account because a NAS is used by a single person or a small group, while an account with Dropbox or a similar service is more likely to be hacked into because more data is available there – due to the significantly higher number of users.
I use a bit of iCloud but it’s size and price to add storage make it much less useful than it could and should be. Cant even backup my iPhone to iCloud without paying to upgrade. I think 1 way Apple could help with this is to make it cumulative IE I have 5 Apple devices so I should have 25GB instead of 5 although I need more like 6TB.
aGREED ( uppercase intended ). Apple needs to convince people to USE their system. Every iOS device purchased should give 200GB FREE for 1 year. If you buy a new iPhone or iPad, you get another year. ( I think it should be 2 years… but Apple will never do that ).
Right now, most users are just opting to use Google Drive’s free service. Once you lose a photos customer to Google, it can be hard to get them back… those users also effectively have one foot out the door to an Android Device.
Apple is so good at that in the past five years, and they are losing markets they once had sewn up. My daughter’s school scraped and saved for iPads but ended up with Chromebooks two years ago in a 1:1 for middle schoolers. $200 for Chromebook, case, and Google Apps perpetual management license (lowest 9″ iPad edu price at the time was $379 before case, MDM, and apps). Just one device in those nearly two years has succumbed to the abuse of getting schlepped back and forth by middle schoolers. Apple’s new $300 iPad is way too little, way too late to get back schools that went for Chromebooks and won’t do much to stem the tide for those who’ve been planning to go for Chrome. Too bad.
I’ve never trusted Syncing and I don’t trust iCloud. I will probably end up safer in the long run managing my own backups of on and off site stored data.
I have everything on iCloud, and every couple of months or so I also back everything up to a local drive.
Yep me too. Smart to have multiple backs ups in multiple places cause shit does and will happen 😉
iCloud all the way!
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iCloud all the way with a routine backup on external backup drive. Never had any issues with iCloud.
“Never had any issues” … but has that statement ever been tested with a major hardware crash & recovery?
If not, then the old saying in Science applies:
“Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence”.
If Apple really cared about user privacy and security, it would offer all Mac and iOS users the option of a VPN with guarantees clearly printed in black & white on the user agreement that Apple wouldn’t datamine or sell your data.
Screw Google, screw Facebook, and screw the ISP data miners.
iCloud 1TB here, plus SpiderOak Unlimited for backups.
Mixed ecosystems so free iCloud for my Pages and Keynote stuff, DropBox, Evernote, Google Photos, and Google Play Music for the rest – and external drive backup via Carbon Copy Cloner (too many friends have had disasters with Time Machine).
I’m happy.
iCloud for app specific files, settings, photo stream. Dropbox for files I collaborate with others. MS OneDrive for work (1TB boom!). These all work reasonably well. Dropbox is overpriced for what it offers, so I stay on the free version.
DropBox existed long before iCloud was viable.
I continue to use both, as they each have their respective good 😊 points.
Local backups on Drobo. Backblaze for offsite. Also use 1TB Dropbox (not for backup; just file sharing), and have been given chunks of MS and AWS as perqs for other services used. I’m not using all the cloud I’ve got, but haven’t spent any time really organizing the most efficient bundle.