Hi, my name is Mauricio and I have a feeling you may have seen an ad offering lifetime
cloud storage space at some point.
In this video I’d like to talk about the pros and cons of these plans, but before I
get to that, I’d like to remind you of the thumbs up to like this video and the bell
button to subscribe if you’d to be notified the next time we put a video up.
Now, let’s talk lifetime plans.
When you sign up for cloud storage, usually you agree to pay a monthly or annual amount
for a certain amount of data.
However, a few storage and backup services decided that it would maybe work better for
them and you to offer lifetime plans, meaning you pay a high fee up front, but then have
the allotted data for, well, life.
In this video we’re going to discuss whether or not lifetime plans are a good idea.
Cloudwards started back in 2012, so you could say that we’ve watched the cloud storage
industry for the better part of a decade and we’ve seen plenty of services come and go.
Especially services that have too good to be true free storage plans of, say, 100GB
or claim unlimited cloud storage for life.
Now, lifetime plans are not as finicky as unlimited plans because they can’t really
be abused.
These plans come with a storage limit, for example, 2TB and usually a monthly bandwidth
limitation.
So while you’re getting a lot of storage, you can’t distribute your pirated movie
collection to all your friends and family.
I’d watch offers **without** bandwidth limitation – in fact, let me warn you: do not pay a
couple hundred dollars if the offer sounds too good to be true.
We’re getting a lot of emails from people who uploaded their entire photo collection
of 20 years only to see it go up in smoke after a service disappears into thin air.
These are sad stories but they are avoidable.
So a bandwidth limit is actually a **good** thing because it doesn’t let people abuse
the system and protect people like you who are using a cloud storage service within the
fair usage limits.
Personally, I love the idea of lifetime plans, I know that I’ll be using cloud storage
in some shape or form for the rest of my life and that our storage needs here at Cloudwards
will only grow bigger.
If I can lock in a good lifetime deal now, even better.
Stay tuned on a few providers that are on my list later in the video.
No one can predict if a service will be here for the next 20 years or so, that’s why
keeping local copies of your files is always a good idea, for example on an external hard
drive or a NAS device.
So should you jump on the next cloud storage deal that you see on Appsumo, or some computer
magazine?
I’m biased, but I’d first check our reviews on Cloudwards.net to see what we have to say
about any of these providers, chances are we’ve reviewed them in the past.
There are two good providers that I want to mention if you’re looking for a deal now,
you can find the links to a special page to the deal in the description box below, I will
keep this description updated because these offers come and go.
Make sure to check them out now, to see if they’re available.
The first provider we’ve been reviewing for years and has always scored very highly
in our ranking is pCloud.
Their lifetime plans are currently roughly 350 dollars for 2TB with a 2TB monthly bandwidth
limitation.
I’m using this plan myself to work with my designers, photographers and video producer
to upload and share files.
I’m not using the sync feature much but rather the so-called drive which let’s me
see and control all my files in the cloud without them taking up any hard drive space.
If you want to know more about that feature I’ll link to an article on Cloudwards that
explains it in-depth.
Will pCloud be around for the next five years?
Honestly, I don’t know.
All I can say is that they’ve made it this far and seem to be on a healthy financial
footing.
You can decide to go for their annual plans which is also a good deal in the cloud storage
world.
Then there is a new kid on the block called Icedrive.
It has a slick website and it is obviously very much inspired by pCloud.
We do welcome a healthy amount of competition in the marketplace because it’ll eventually
get you better deals.
With Icedrive, you can get up to 5TB for roughly 450 USD per month.
So the price per terabyte is cheaper than what you get with pCloud.
We’ve reviewed Icedrive on Cloudwards and were quite impressed with this newcomer and
I’ll leave you the link in the description box below.
Icedrive has similar features than pCloud but obviously it doesn’t have the track
record yet that pCloud enjoys.
We do like the fact that client side encryption is built in and doesn’t have to purchased
extra but on the other hand they’re still lacking critical features like file versioning.
But by looking at their roadmap some interesting features are about to come and the price might
go up when they add more features, again i’ll leave you a special sign up link in the description
if you like what you saw.
Lifetime cloud storage deals are nothing bad per se but when you see an offer, do watch
the track record of providers.
If you can’t find a review on Cloudwards, you probably shouldn’t sign up.
That being said, we love to hear which provider you chose and if you’re happy so far.
Leave a comment below and make sure to watch our next episode.