If you work with photos, illustrations, or for example your own texts, you need to think about a good data backup.
However burning DVDs and uploading to external discs are not the best solutions, which is why the alpha and omega of a good software backup are now so called web cloud services. But which one of them you should choose?
Dropbox
Lets start with the probably best known and most used cloud service on our list. Dropbox is a great service that is supported by all of the big operating system, including the mobile ones.
We wrote about how to start with Dropbox in one of ours previous articles, so just in short, lets just say that Dropbox allows you to download its application to your computer, where you can use it as a folder that automatically uploads its content onto a server cloud.
If you only need about 2 or 3 GB of space for your backup, Dropbox is the perfect solution for you. The basic capacity that Dropbox offers for free contains 2 GB of free space that you can later expand by a few megabytes if you invite some of your friends to Dropbox or you run through the website's tutorial.
However if you need more space, this may not be the best service for you, because paid Dropbox isn't exactly the cheapest. Dropbox Pro will cost you €9.99 per month, which is €119.88 ($128) per year. For this price, you will get 1000 GB (1 TB) of free space and several other Dropbox extra functions.
OneDrive
You may already have Microsoft OneDrive on your computer without even knowing it. Operating systems Windows 8 and 8.1 contain it automatically (you can find it by searching on your Start menu). Everybody else can simply download OneDrive for Mac, older versions of Windows, mobile operating systems (Android, iOS, Windows), and even for Xbox.
Windows really stepped it up a notch with OneDrive, mainly through its mobile app that for example allows you to upload your photo on a cloud immediately after you shoot it. OneDrive is also very closely link with Microsoft Office programmes like Word or PowerPoint.
If you are a fan and a Windows user, OneDrive is the service for you. On the other hand, that is also the reason why the other users maybe won't be that much interested in it, because it wasn't designed primarily for their operating systems. Microsoft also watches what you upload on OneDrive and censors uploading of for example sensitive or offensive files.
OneDrive offers 15 GB of free space. If you would need more, you can get another 100 GB for $1.99 per month ($23.88 per year) or 200 GB for $3.99 per month ($47.88 per year).
Google Drive
Google Drive is for Google basically the same thing as OneDrive for Windows. If you already have a mail account with Google, you automatically received your own data storage on Google Drive with 15 GB of free space. The good news is that these 15 GB are free, the bad news is that this also contains all the data from your email and your Google+ profile.
So Google Drive gets a similar verdict as OneDrive - it is a great service for Google users (it works great when you want to share files via emails). With Google Drive, you can get 100 GB of free space for $1,99 per month or one TB for $9,99. You can check out other tariffs here.
Copy
By now, Copy is still a less known service, but it is a very professional cloud service for businesses and individuals alike. And as with OneDrive and Google Drive, even with Copy you can get 15 GB of free space. However if you share a folder with someone, the size of that folder will also divide between all users that you shared it with. So if you for example share a 15 GB folder between two other users, it will only take 5 GB of your space.
Copy works with Windows, Mac, iOs, and Android. If you would need any more space, you can boost your capacity to 250 GB for $10 per month. All in all, Copy is a simple, practical, and very useful alternative to mainstream data cloud services. But if you would want to use its paid plan, it's a bit more expensive.
