Hurricane reminder why I love the cloud

[TenFour]

As I watch the relentless progress of Hurricane Ian towards Florida, where I have several relatives and friends sheltering, I am once again reminded of how great it is to keep most of my digital stuff in the cloud and not locally. A few years ago I read about someone who escaped Houston's floods during Hurricane Harvey with not much more than the clothes he was wearing, but was able to keep working because he just went into a store, bought a new Chromebook, and logged back in to find all of his email, files, photos, etc. Just in day-to-day life I find cloud stuff saves me constantly, like when on vacation and I get an urgent message from work that something has to be done ASAP. I can't imagine going back to desktop email with local storage.

[janusz]

May I ask how much disk space in the cloud do you use?

[TenFour]

For many years I had Pixel phones with unlimited Google Photos storage, but that has ended. At the moment I have about 33GB in the cloud.

[janusz]

Originally Posted by TenFour

At the moment I have about 33GB in the cloud.

I guess it's not exactly free...

[TenFour]

100GB for $19.99 a year on Google 1.

[jeffpan]

Originally Posted by TenFour

100GB for $19.99 a year on Google 1.

GMX.net provides 100GB cloud storage for free. for which I have used about 30+GB.

$ rclone size gmx:
Total objects: 50 (50)
Total size: 31.617 GiB (33948286522 Byte)

[janusz]

Originally Posted by jeffpan

GMX.net provides 100GB cloud storage for free

Good to know. Thanks for sharing this information.

[TenFour]

GMX.net provides 100GB cloud storage for free

The ad I see here in the USA for GMX promotes 65 GB of email storage and only 2GB free for file storage. I only have about 3GB of email with most of my cloud storage being files. Other things I like about Google's storage is the online office, Google Photos, and family sharing of Google 1.

[jeffpan]

Originally Posted by TenFour

The ad I see here in the USA for GMX promotes 65 GB of email storage and only 2GB free for file storage. I only have about 3GB of email with most of my cloud storage being files. Other things I like about Google's storage is the online office, Google Photos, and family sharing of Google 1.

GMX is quite complicated system in brand design. let me tell you:

1. only GMX.net, GMX.ch and GMX.de are the original GMX ISP mail.
2. GMX and Web.de were merged into 1and1 later, web.de is also ISP mail.
3. GMX.com, GMX.it, GMX.fr, GMX.ca, GMX.cn, GMX.se, GMX.us ... all other GMX domains are GMX international, not the ISP mail.
4. Mail.com (and world.com, USA.com etc) were acquired by 1and1, they are the same as GMX international.
5. CaraMail.com (and .fr) have corporations with GMX, they are powered by GMX.com too.
6. GMX ISP has the advantages that GMX international doesn't have: large storage for netdisk, a lot of aliases for their funny domains, different antispam policies etc. for which I suggest you use the ISP mail rather than GMX international.

[TenFour]

If I go to GMX.net I get the German language site and it shows the free version provides 1GB of email storage and 2GB of cloud storage. Not seeing the free 100GB of storage. https://www.gmx.net/mail/#.pc_page.h...index.nav.mail

Looks like you can buy 100GB of storage for 1.99 Euros a month, which is similar to Google 1 pricing here in the USA. https://www.gmx.net/cloud/#.pc_page....footer_7.cloud

[somdcomputerguy]

My two 'primary' 'clouds' are in Fastmail's File Storage and my webhost account. Technically I'm not supposed to 'just store' files on my web hosts computers, but if I have a bunch of pictures that are displayed by a gallery script or something, that's OK. I'm paying about $50/yr for the email service and my web account would cost me a bit around $100/yr, but it's free for me because I used to be a moderator on their now nonexistant ( ) forum. At the moment I have other things to keep in mind than how 'big my clouds are', I just know for a fact that I'm only using a small fraction of that combined space, and that fraction has had a real slow grow rate for the last decade or so..

- bruce

[TenFour]

With up to 12 feet of storm surge along Florida's southwest coast there will be a lot of computers, hard drives, and servers underwater soon! Plus, power is likely to be out for a long time over a large area.

[janusz]

Originally Posted by TenFour

power is likely to be out for a long time over a large area.

If this case it doesn't really matter where your files are stored

[TenFour]

If this case it doesn't really matter where your files are stored

If stored in a major cloud provider your files will be safe and accessible via a cell phone in many cases. Sure, cell phone service can get knocked out, but you still have no worries about power surges, flooding, fire, theft, etc. that can all impact your local storage. My office building was hit by lightning last year, destroying a bunch of computers and equipment. A worker dropped his laptop in water, destroying it. At a previous job our server died, taking a bunch of stuff with it. Even though we had daily backups it was a major job restoring things and some stuff was just lost. These things are normal and frequent, which is why I like the cloud.

[jeffpan]

Originally Posted by TenFour

If I go to GMX.net I get the German language site and it shows the free version provides 1GB of email storage and 2GB of cloud storage. Not seeing the free 100GB of storage. https://www.gmx.net/mail/#.pc_page.h...index.nav.mail

Looks like you can buy 100GB of storage for 1.99 Euros a month, which is similar to Google 1 pricing here in the USA. https://www.gmx.net/cloud/#.pc_page....footer_7.cloud

The storage was increasing following the use time on GMX.net.
My acct has been used for 15 years, and i saw it increased every year (just my case).

besides this, if you own a alumni email from university (domain ends with .edu), you can apply for OneDrive for 1TB storage with this email. I have two this email (BA in CN, MA in USA), so I have double 1TB store from OneDrive. But I don't trust MS, so used them very few.