Comparison of storage clouds

Cloud Basics

Conclusions

If being dependent on one provider or the cost of a subscription are not enough to deter you, and if you are not afraid of data leakage, then Dropbox or a similar service will be the most convenient solution. The only thing you have to do is complete the very simple client installation, and the provider takes care of everything else. The service is sophisticated, complimentary services from third-party providers add versatility, and the platform has a broad base of support.

If you want to keep the reins in your own hands and are confident in your abilities to manage highly available and secure storage yourself, you should take a look at ownCloud. Once it has overcome its teething problems, ownCloud could be a comprehensive and yet inexpensive private cloud for storage that supports many clients and is relatively easy to set up and manage.

If you neither want to trust Dropbox nor have sufficient storage expertise of your own, then a cloud as an NAS spin-off might be right for you. However, you must be aware of the limitations: The DS712+ tested here only had two disk bays, for example. When mirrored, that is only enough for a maximum of 3TB. Additionally, the cache has a size limit, there is not enough space for a hot spare, data is not encrypted for storage, the number of possible accounts is limited, as is the file size (1GB), and so on. Larger hardware models are available from Synology, but they only raise the limits of one device a little. Moreover, without a Linux, mobile, or browser client, the platform support is currently quite lean.

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