- So last week I made a video about how, when moving files
from OneDrive to Google Drive caused me an issue
because Google Drive doesn't do this nifty feature
that the OneDrive has called Files on Demand.
A couple of people commented that I was using
the wrong Google Drive app,
and well who'd have known it, but they were right.
So, I thought this week was pretty timely to do a video
on a bit of a comparison between Google, Microsoft, Apple,
Dropbox, since they're probably the most well known
file syncing apps out there.
There are also others like Amazon and Azure files
but as those typically get a lot more involved,
I thought we stick to just those for today,
but I might touch on them very, very briefly.
(upbeat music)
Anyway, so to keep this fair,
we're gonna address each service purely based
on the storage service offering.
We're not gonna get into the intricacies
of 365 versus G Suite.
We'll also address a few key areas for each product.
Pricing, user experience, sharing,
backup or retention,
data sovereignty, and reliability/uptime.
So firstly, let's talk Microsoft.
(upbeat music)
On a personal level, you can get five gig for free,
you can upgrade to 100 gig for 1.99
or pay 59.99 per year for one terabyte of space.
On the business side of things, you get one terabyte,
OneDrive with most of the paid for plans.
And since you're already likely already subscribed
to Office 365 then, you already have this
at no additional cost.
Now in terms of accessing the OneDrive,
the app runs pretty much on anything.
Mac, Windows, mobile,
even on platforms like Microsoft Xbox.
So a couple of things I like about this,
it's a single app for personal
and business OneDrive accounts,
and you can sign into multiple accounts without any issues.
Their Files on Demand feature, which I mentioned last week,
which only downloads files that you've recently accessed
to save your space on your machine.
Multiple people can work on the same files
at the same time and see edits live and platforms
like Microsoft Power Automate can be used
to totally automate the creation and movement of your files.
A few things I don't like, well with Files on Demand
you can't choose how long to keep the files.
I'd love to be able to set say, 7 days or 30 days
before the files are then removed from the cache locally
to save you space,
but actually none of the apps have that feature.
So it's not really specific to OneDrive.
Now the biggest bug bear I have with OneDrive
is their maximum file size limit, which is 15 gig.
Because sometimes these video files
I produce are 60 gig, nice.
Now when it comes to sharing,
as you'd expect of course, you can share the files
and folders with anybody, internal, external,
and yes, keynote here, those without a Microsoft account
can even edit the documents.
You can also set a date for when access expires
and you can also set a password to access
which is a pretty neat feature for security.
Now, as far as backups go,
as I've mentioned in plenty of my other videos,
Office 365 is not backed up.
Now Microsoft even state this in their terms and conditions
when you go and sign up.
That you need to find a third party backup tool
to backup your data.
So whilst, yes you might have a copy of the data
on your machine, which is then also stored
in the Microsoft Cloud.
This doesn't protect you from deleting something
accidentally and not realising until six months later,
at which point it's too late.
The file has gone forever to the dusty graveyard
of the discarded Word and Excel files.
Probably also where the Microsoft Paperclip
has gone to rest.
Now for data sovereignty,
you can check where your data is stored,
by going to the Office 365 Admin Centre,
you go to Settings, Organisation profile, Data Location,
but generally speaking, if you signed up for Office 365
in the UK, then your data will be stored in the UK.
In other news, only a few selected 365 services
are stored outside of the UK.
So follow the link in the comments below,
to see what those services might be.
Also a point of note here,
Microsoft offer their Multi-Geo service
where your data can be localised,
where it needs to be on an individual basis,
is only offered to companies with over 500 seats.
So if you truly are a global organisation
and you need your data sovereignty to be localised
around the globe then, that's a good feature for you.
And I actually applaud Microsoft for giving administrators
the choice and visibility here,
whilst most online storage services will be the likes
of GDPR, PCI, DSS, and ISO compliance.
There is still a hurdle that some business owners
struggle with when they know that their data
is physically located in the US.
Raises questions over the U.S. government
having access to their data, even behind all of the strict
regulations and all of their compliance.
Onto reliability, and what I've done here
is I've done a Google new search for outages
for each of these products.
On the 2nd of May 2019, there was a three hour outage.
On the 30th of January 2019, there was a four hour outage.
There was another four hour outage
on the 29th of November in 2018,
and then we're right back to March 2017.
On to Google this time.
(upbeat music)
This is what caught me out before.
So Google's products, which is named Google Drive,
which you still access by browsing to drive.google.com,
used to use the application called Google Drive.
And in fact, you can still download the Google Drive app
on your mobile device.
On Mac and PC you don't download Google Drive anymore.
You used to, you now download either Google Backup and Sync,
or if you're a business user,
you can also download Google Drive File Stream, simple.
So there in lies my first issue.
Akin to Microsoft's recent rebrand
of their Microsoft Flow platform
to Microsoft Power Automates, yet lots of literature
and URLs still talk about Microsoft Flow.
Except, Google launched their Drive File Stream in 2017,
two and a half years ago,
yet they still don't seem to have their name
standardised across the board.
Thus the confusion in my previous video.
With that aside, personally, you get 15 gig for free,
which is pretty cool.
A hundred gig for 15.99 a year,
so cheaper than Microsoft OneDrive.
200 gig four 24 pounds a year,
two terabytes for 79.99 a year,
and that goes right up to 10, 20, 30 terabytes of storage.
Now from a business perspective on G Suite,
you can pay four pound 60 per user per month
for 30 gig of cloud Storage.
And then from nine pounds, 20,
upwards on their plans,
you get unlimited cloud storage,
providing you have more than five users,
which is a shame, but I guess it stops people like me
abusing the free storage.
Again, you may have already been subscribed to G Suite
for your email and other features.
So this could be something that you already have
at no additional cost.
Once you've got your head around the different
client applications, is actually pretty good.
With Google Backup and Sync, you can back up folders
outside of your Google Drive folder,
so your desktops or your download folders.
But this client stores everything on your machine,
unless you specifically don't sync certain folders,
meaning you either need to use the web client to get access
or a massive hard drive to store everything locally.
Over to Google File Stream,
it works in a very similar way to OneDrive.
Files stay in the cloud until you access them,
then they download and store them on your machine,
while you're accessing them,
and then get cached for a little while.
And then in terms of using multiple accounts,
again, confusion strikes.
Whilst I was successful in adding two Google accounts,
into Google Backup and Sync,
which essentially runs two separate instances
in the task bar on my Mac.
A post on the Google Forum states,
that you can sign into up to three Google Accounts
at the same time, yet literally the line below that,
it states that there isn't a built in feature
to use two accounts at the same time.
On the other hand with Google File Stream,
you can't use multiple accounts.
You can only use just the one.
So from a cost perspective, the fact that you get
unlimited storage for a relatively low monthly price,
means that as a pure file storage,
Google Drive so far wins the debate for me.
When it comes to sharing of course,
you can share internally,
and externally with the caveats.
If the person you're sending to
doesn't have a Google account,
they can only view the files, they can't edit them.
So Microsoft and OneDrive has a bit of a one-up
on Google here, but a counter to that is likely,
who doesn't have a Google Account of some form nowadays?
Worth noting here, you can also change permissions
for sharing externally from an administrative level,
to prevent people sharing outside of the company,
if you wish, as you can with OneDrive.
As far as backups come, once again, the same story,
Google Drive is not backed up.
But outside of that they have a short window
of 25 to 30 days for being able to actually recover
any deleted files.
Data sovereignty, now Google doesn't provide any facility
to choose or determine where your actual data is located.
They state that their data is replicated
throughout multiple locations for resiliency.
So they're not as transparent as Microsoft,
but just reminder that both Microsoft
and Google's offerings are fully compliant with the likes
of GDPR and PCI DSS, Healthcare, and other regulations,
of course with that said, you best double check
with any specifics if you need to be legally compliant.
One thing just to note here as well I noticed,
is that Google doesn't provide
their Data Processing Amendments,
or the Model Contract Clauses,
for anyone not using the business G Suite platform.
Onto reliability, so according to my research,
there was an outage on the 27th of January,
that lasted for around one hour.
On the 19th of August 2019, for around two hours.
On the 17th of April 2019, for around two hours.
On the 13th of March 2019, for around four hours.
Now over to Dropbox.
(upbeat music)
So Dropbox personal plans, get you two terabytes of space
for 7.99 a month, or three terabytes for 16.58 per month.
On the business side of things, is 10 pounds per month,
for a minimum of three users,
and you get five terabytes of space.
And then it's 15 pounds per user per month
for a minimum again of three users with unlimited space.
Which is a shame again, if you're a single user,
or only a couple of users wanting access
to the business features,
because you're forced to pay for three users.
Sharing wise, you can share externally of course,
and similar to others, a caveat that if you share a folder
that's being accessed by multiple people,
then the other end will need to sign up for at least
a free Dropbox account.
Otherwise they'll only be able to download
and view the files.
Now from a backup and recovery perspective,
the personal two terabyte plan gets you 30 days
actual backup and version history.
And the three terabyte plan has 180 days.
But all of the business plans also have 180 days,
which is miles better than Microsoft,
or Google, anybody so far.
So thumbs up to Dropbox.
Dropbox also has Smart Sync
which is their version of only downloading the files
that you need to store locally,
and this is only available on their Plus,
professional and business accounts.
So personal accounts, you don't get this feature.
Onto data sovereignty, with Dropbox again,
it's the likes of ISO and GDPR compliance,
but you don't get to choose where your data is located,
unless you have 15 users or more, where you can specify
their EU-based data hosting service.
Otherwise data is stored primarily in the US
but also in Germany, Australia and Japan.
Onto outages, so on June the sixth 2019,
there was a two hour outage.
And to be honest, that's actually all of the ones
that appeared in the Google News feeds,
when I searched for the exact same search terms
as all the others.
So make of that, what you will I guess.
(upbeat music)
Lastly, we have Amazon AWS, which I'll touch on,
it's worth a mention.
Pricing wise, it is far too difficult to go into here.
But depending on your use case,
I see AWS as probably being the most affordable storage
of all really.
For example, I use a Mac-based security CCTV system
called Security Spy
and that has a feature that copies
the CCTV footage into AWS.
I currently have half a terabyte in AWS,
and I'm paying less than two dollars per month.
Now the issue here is their pricing takes into account
so many other factors, the storage space you need,
the number of transfers in, number of transfers out,
archive glacier storage.
So, so many options, but it's cheap, very, very cheap.
So it makes a great place to store backup files
or files that you don't really need to access that often.
Onto user experience, and this is where Amazon
falls down of course.
And yes, because this isn't...
This is really targeted at businesses and not consumers.
But you also have to do a bit of digging to find clients
that allow you easy access to your data
via say, a Mac Drive or FTP server or so forth.
Nothing quite like the experience of just signing in
with your username and password like everything else does.
Backup up retention.
So, using AWS, you can also specify backups
and configure them as often as you require.
But again, this requires a fairly decent level of knowledge
on how to browse around the AWS Console,
but it certainly gives you the best options
compared to the other providers.
On to data sovereignty, as with Microsoft,
when you create your storage pools,
you can specify where you want them to be stored.
So they check the boxes here too.
Now onto reliability.
22nd of October 2019, there was an eight hour outage,
August 31st 2019, an outage in the US
was another eight hour outage.
February 2017, there was a circa three hour outage
in the U.S.
Other than this, there are generally multiple outages
per year before this.
And they seem to be fairly dramatic
that they're off for hours rather than the one
or two hours we see with lots of the other services.
But then it is very affordable.
And if you're just looking for storing files
that you don't often need access to like my CCTV,
or archive data, then outages likely aren't really
a big deal to us.
(upbeat music)
The last one to get an honourable mention,
would of course be Apple's own iCloud storage.
200 gig for 2.49 a month.
Two terabytes for 6.99 a month.
User experience is probably where Apple would win here,
but only of course, if you're on an Apple device.
It seamlessly integrates with all aspects
of the Apple Ecosystem from your photos, videos, music,
backing up your mobile devices,
it's just so easy to get to your data.
Credit where credit is due, part of Apple's whole existence
is around just making sure everything just works.
And they do succeed at this in many areas.
When it comes to back up, this is where it gets tricky.
In a nutshell, it is difficult to near impossible
to reliably and automatically back up the contents
of your iCloud storage.
There are also no clearly documented retention periods
for how long Apple will store deleted files.
So in the event of accidentally deleting something
and only realising a few months later,
you'll have pretty much little
to no options to recover.
With Apple you never know precisely
where your data actually is.
In 2018 Apple disclosed that their data is stored
on both Amazon and Google's commercial
cloud storage systems.
So that could cover anywhere effectively.
Now if we take a look at the reliability
and uptime for iCloud,
well, since iCloud sits on the back of other platforms,
it's a similar story to the above.
Research shows multiple outages throughout 2019 in May,
June, July, October,
a four hour outage in March, one in December,
and that's just on the first page
of the Google search results.
So likely not the most reliable
to use as your primary means of storage.
As to which services best of all of the above?
Well, it depends is the answer.
If you're looking for cheap storage
that you don't mind getting a hands on,
or rather fingers dirty in learning how to connect
you to your data, then AWS, hands down I'd say.
If you're in the Office 365 Ecosystem already,
OneDrive makes perfect sense, as does the Google Drive
or File Sync and Recover Stream thing,
if you're a G Suite user,
Dropbox does seem the general go to for many business users,
but that, I think is mostly down to people
not realising you have storage at your fingertips
in Google Drive or Office 365.
So you could actually look to save some money
by moving your data from Dropbox
over to one of those existing services.
With Apple, well, personally I wouldn't store anything
business related on it,
unless of course your whole business operates
from the Apple ecosystem.
Your iPhones, Macs, the lot,
but even then sharing becomes quite difficult.
So that is pretty much everything for this week.
A quick overview of all the platforms,
hope you have not done anyone a disservice
by saying the wrong thing about the wrong products.
Most of this is based on my experience of using
each of the platforms and some quick researching online.
For those interested,
so we obviously use Office 365 heavily, within Tekkers.
We have a lot of our data stored in Office 365
in SharePoint and OneDrive.
Personally, I actually have my files
in a G Suite business account
for my personal side of things.
So I'm moving as I said previously,
moving my data into there.
And yeah, I have positive things to say about
both Google and 365.
So there is no Office 365 versus G Suite thing here.
They both got their own positives,
both got some drawbacks, and yeah,
I'll leave it to you to make your own decisions.
Thanks as always for watching.
Of course like the video
if you did, subscribe if you're not already,
hit the bell icon on YouTube
to be notified of our future videos,
and I'll see you in the next one.
Thank you, bye bye.
(upbeat music)