It is possible to have a free/cheap, good, and fast personal cloud storage service? Believe it or not, it is.
While remote file storage has been with us for decade—I had remote storage on a Unix server using file transfer protocol (ftp) and NFS (Network File System) in the 80s—cloud storage for the masses didn’t really get going until 2007 when Drew Houston, Dropbox‘s CEO and founder, got sick and tired of never being able to “remember to keep my USB drive with me. I was drowning in email attachments trying to share files for my previous startup. My home desktop’s power supply literally exploded one day, killing one of my hard drives, and I had no backups.”
So after he “tried everything I could find but each product inevitably suffered problems with Internet latency, large files, bugs, or just made me think too much,” he came up with the idea of the first popular cloud-based personal file storage service. In the six years since then it seems like everyone is offering some kind of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud storage
Gallery: Browse 10 cloud storage services
These services are popping up everywhere and they’re changing prices, amounts of free storage, and additional services almost every day. Here’s what’s what with them in early 2013.