In my leisure time, I love taking photos using my DSLR. On normal occasions where I do not have my DSLR camera, my phone is the closest companion to capture the moment be it photos or videos. When my daughter was born I have tons of photos and videos of her. As I was trigger-happy, firing away all the shots through my smart phone, suddenly I realized that my internal memory and external memory which came up to a total of 64GB worth of storage space were no longer enough to store these footages or photos which I have captured. Worse still, if my SD card was corrupted or if I lost my smart phone, all these precious memories captured will be gone.
Thanks to cloud storages available out there that I can still preserve all the moments which I have captured onto the cloud. At first, I was using Dropbox to store these photos/videos as I managed to get about 200GB worth of storage for free when I bought a Korean branded phone at that time. All my photos were automatically synced to Dropbox storage. However, 200GB free space is not free forever, after 2 years, the offer expires and I need to subscribe to their paid services. For 1TB worth of storage on Dropbox now will cost about RM40 per month which is equivalent to RM480 per year. For personal use, this is out of my budget for me.
As I was an early adopter of Google Suite(Google Apps during that time), I was using Google Apps for free which comes with 50-100 free google accounts with storage up to 17GB per account. I start to create multiple accounts to store my photos on Google Photos / Drive. This is cumbersome, as 17GB of storage never seems to be enough. But better have something than nothing. The problem with using these promotional / beta accounts is that there will always be a limit in storage space or window period of usage. Don’t get me wrong, I am totally grateful for these promotional services by Dropbox and Google. If you wish to pay for Google Drive storage, the pricing is as below:
The pricing is almost similiar to Dropbox but here you have the option to go for the 100GB storage first which cost only RM8.49 per month. You can store quite a lot with 100GB which is somewhat affordable. It’s barely price of my one day lunch in a local coffee shop.
Currently, I am using office 365’s One Drive storage. It easily syncs all my photos and videos into OneDrive. My understanding is that Office 365 will alert you if they detect Ransomware on your drive and you have the ability to restore file up to 30 days.
The pricing above is for personal use and not for office usage. If you share option 1 which is Office 365 Home with 5 people, it comes up with a total of about RM76 per person per year. Which turns out about RM6.40 per month with 1TB of One Drive + Desktop version of Office. This is the most attractive.
If plan to use Office 365 for your business or company, then I can recommend you Office 365 Business Essentials for a start. Office 365 BE(Business Essentials) comes with 1TB of storage, 50GB of Mailbox size with Exchange online technology. Yes you can now own your very own email address and boost your company image. Of course you will need to subscribe to a domain name of your desire for example www.businessname.com. Office 365 BE only cost USD5 per user per month. On top of that, you will also get to enjoy other features like Skype for Business, SharePoint Online, Yammer, Microsoft Teams, etc. You can find out more information by visiting http://10.100.12.40/office-365/
In conclusion, it’s really up to you on what budget you have or how much you are willing to spend to preserve your photos, documents, I even put my tax documents or records on the cloud in case they fade away or got lost physically. Will talk more about backing up my documents on the cloud in my next blog post. My view is that, Office 365 offers more value for money compared to other plans.
So, back to the story where I stored my precious moments of my daughter. My daughter is now almost 6 years old and I still have all the photos and videos of her ever since when she was a baby. She could even now see how she was like when she was a baby. It really a good father-daughter bonding time together whenever she asked me to stream the video or show her photos from the cloud storage using my phone, iPad or laptop. Whenever my storage space on my mobile device is full, I just delete all the photos after syncing automatically to my cloud drive. By the way, Microsoft offers 99.9% SLA on their Office 365 services. No more worries.
