And Amazon offers unlimited photo storage and 5GB of file storage with a Prime membership.Īpple and Microsoft’s freebies matter more since they’re sewn so tightly into their operating systems. Google also offers unlimited free image storage (by compressing large photos in a way I have yet to notice) and excellent organization and sharing features in Android and iOS through its Google Photos app. Instead, you have contrasting pros and cons.Īll but Amazon offer a free tier: 2GB at Dropbox, 5GB at Apple and Microsoft, 15GB at Google. And if your phone runs Google’s Android and your laptop is a Chromebook, Google One is the obvious complement.īut for a lot of us, no such uniformity exists and there’s no instant pick between those two, Microsoft’s OneDrive, Amazon Drive and Dropbox. If you stick with Apple’s hardware, sign up for its iCloud service. If all of your devices are from one company or run on software from the same firm, that decision can be simple. It’s getting hard to unbox without a signup: Few new gadgets let you get past their welcome screens without inviting you to subscribe to a cloud-storage service to augment their storage and backup their data. Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of free storage Microsoft and Google offer.
