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Comment by niggler | Hacker News Reader

What are the alternatives to google drive, and how do they compare?

SkyDrive and DropBox are the two that come to mind.

SkyDrive is quite good offering from Microsoft, I've not had downtime yet, but I just don't like the idea they scan my photographs for the old nudies! (Which apparently violate their TOS).

DropBox is for some reason a darling with some people on the internet, I think because they love Python. However they had a security oopsie, which I don't care how short it was for, wasn't adiquately explained to my liking as to how such a mistake could be made.

I like Dropbox because it has a great & simple UI that masks some clever engineering. Does SkyDrive opportunistically do P2P LAN transfers?

(More cynically, their reputation on "the internet" may be slightly inflated due to a very clever referral link scheme)

Skydrive, and most of Microsoft's online services, went down for hours last week.

Back when I was deciding what cloud drive to use I considered SkyDrive for a little while. However, after they admitted to the scanning of your files for nudes and illegal material I dropped them straight away and will never return.

I've heard of the security issues with Dropbox so I always have any possible private/sensitive data encrypted in case the worst ever happened. (I use Dropbox because I have not found a alternative that just works)

The only one I can really recommend is SpiderOak, due to their zero-knowledge policy on what users upload. Everything is encrypted with your password, and if you lose that, you're SOL. They have no way of seeing what you've uploaded, so they're just providing you some drive space. It's a wonderful service altogether.

If you would like to help me out and use my referral link (so you and I get some extra free GBs), it's https://spideroak.com/download/referral/049cbbf6bc2c2df3b005...

I'd love to give spideroak another try if someone can confirm their mobile apps (for iOS and android) function.

Their android app functions, but it's more of a client to access your files rather than automatically sync them. I might have missed something in the options, but as far as I know it's just a file browser.

Since a number of other people have already mentioned Dropbox, I'l mention something slightly different: git-annex (http://git-annex.branchable.com/)

It's a more general piece of software, but combined with git-annex assistant and your choice of hosting provider(s), it lets you create your own cloud storage, so you have potentially no concerns over privacy[0].

If you're looking for fault-tolerance, git-annex lets you distribute this storage over an arbitrary number of providers easily, so you can get redundancy between an array of cloud hosting providers.

I've been using git-annex for several months now, and while it's still a work in progress, I haven't had any issues at all with it. It seems to be very reliable and bug-free; the main things being developed now are additional advanced features and an improved GUI interface, etc. For people already accustomed to using git on the command line, though, it should be a seamless experience.

[0] This depends on how much you trust Amazon/Rackspace/your colo/etc., but that's a separate level of trust altogether.

I've got to reexamine git-annex some day, but I've been happily using unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) for the past seven years or so. It's rock solid. I use it to sync my home directory, 2TB of media files, and retrieve email (Maildir).

There's Microsoft's Office 360, but I haven't used it myself.

Dropbox and your choice of editing program

Dropbox, Skydrive, Box.net and Amazon Cloud Drive are some of the bigger alternatives. But as with any cloud service, downtime is always a risk.

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