Last semester a fellow grad student shared a horror story. She was putting the final touches on the major paper for a class. She saved her document, and started to print it, but discovered she was out of paper. Her printer was in another room so she went to go put in more paper, but when she returned she found her now dead laptop in a pool of water, her cat having knocked a glass of water over the keyboard. She then recounted her hours of tears in the computer repair store waiting to find out if anything on her hard drive could be salvaged. I sympathized, but kept wondering why she hadn’t saved her document to some sort of cloud storage device. Her laptop might still be in shambles, but at least some of her panic could have been erased if she knew that all of her work was safe, somewhere out in the ether.
c All three programs give you some free initial storage, and can be upgraded to more storage for a price. All three can be set up to save your files both in the cloud and locally so that you can edit documents when offline and automatically sync when you are re-connected to the internet. All three give you the comfort of knowing that even if your computer crashes, is stolen, or has a liter of water dumped on it by your cat, you haven’t lost all your documents forever. It also frees you from the chains of your flash drive and make sharing big or multiple files much easier.
So what’s the difference?
Dropbox is the only service to support Linux or Blackberry natively, whereas OneDrive is the only one to have Windows Phone capabilities. They all support Windows, Mac OS, iOS, and Android. If you want to share a folder where people can only see the files but not edit them, you don’t want Dropbox. Only Google Drive and OneDrive have customizable sharing and access settings. Similarly, both Google Drive and OneDrive have the capabilities for simultaneous online document editing. (How awesome it was the first time I saw a friend in another state editing typos as I wrote in an additional point on a presentation!) For Google these files have to be converted to their corresponding Google Doc formats and, unsurprisingly, the OneDrive documents have to be Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote.)
Other cool things:
- If you install a SkyDrive desktop application you can have access to every file on the PC it is installed in; so as long as your PC is on, running One Drive, and turned on, you can have any of your files through the SkyDrive website.
- In Dropbox you can “earn” more storage space. For each person you refer to Dropbox you get an extra 500MB of Space (up to 20GB).
- Google Drive supports the viewing of files the others do not, like Adobe Illustrator (.AI) and Photoshop (.PSD) files, Autodesk AutoCad files, and Scalable Vector Graphics files.
My friend was lucky. Her harddrive was salvageable enough to retrieve her paper, but it was a trauma that could have been so much less if she had used a cloud storage device. I personally tend to use Dropbox for my personal documents which I want to access from anywhere, and Google Drive and OneDrive for sharing files with others, but you can choose the method that works best for you. What’s important is considering your academic survival plan for a Catwater Apocalypse.
– Written by Renée Dunn, Computer Services Training and Documentation GA
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