Ever tried to download a new song or take a photo with your smartphone, only to be greeted by that dreaded ‘Storage is full’ notification? The situation is even worse when your PC runs out of space, as this is generally where people store most of their media collections. Although smartphone and hard disk storage capacity has increased over the years, large media files like photos, videos and music can quickly eat up that precious space. Fortunately, cloud storage services and apps can be used to free up space without you having to delete or backup your files to another hard drive, and even better, most of these services offer free plans.
Here are our picks of the top apps, to ensure your smartphone and PC never runs out of storage:
Dropbox
Every smartphone and PC user will need to send files to another user or computer, at some point in time, or even store important files to save space. Dropbox is one easiest and most efficient apps to use for cloud storage. Dropbox can create a link of a file you need to share from your phone or automatically back-up files you choose from your smartphone. A standard Dropbox account gives you 2GB per account to use across your tablet, mobile and desktop, with more options for paid storage available.
Google Drive
Android & iOS users have access to some of the best cloud storage apps available, including apps by Android’s parent company – Google. Google Drive is one of the most convenient apps to have installed on your Android smartphone. After identifying a file on your Android smartphone, simply select a sharing option and share it directly to Google Drive. With the purchase of certain Android devices comes an offer for an additional 100GB of cloud storage to the existing 15GB of free storage to use across your Google apps. There are also more paid storage options if you need.
Google Photos
One of the biggest storage consumers on a smartphone is photos. Google Photos offers Android and iOS users the best option to clear your device without deleting those precious photos. However, the bonus with Google Photos is that it takes up no space. All photos from your Android smartphone can be automatically backed up to Google Photos for free at a high quality. This can be backed up over Wi-Fi or using mobile data. If a photo exceeds the size of an acceptable file or video, Google Photos borrows storage from your Google Drive.
OneDrive
OneDrive is a popular app from Microsoft for PC, as well as Android iOS smartphones, offering 5GB of free cloud storage. Paid options are also available on the platform with higher storage limits. Files can also be shared from a smartphone to OneDrive in a similar way to Google Drive.
The great thing about the above apps like OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive and Photos is that you can use all of them on your devices at once, meaning that you could 22GB of free storage right now. Cloud storage is revolutionising the way we store digital files, so expensive physical storage is no longer a must-have, however, uploading and downloading large files to cloud storage apps does use a lot of data, so its best to do so on Wi-Fi only (you can select this option from within the apps).
