Cloud Storage questions

[xHashii]

Hey guys!

 

What's the best/most worth cloud service? I've looked around OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and etc. What's your advice/opinion on them?

And my second and probably last question is, should we edit directly from the cloud service or transfer the stuff that we'll need and just save the projects on cloud?

 

Thanks in advance!

[burh4n]

7 minutes ago, xHashii said:

Hey guys!

 

What's the best/most worth cloud service? I've looked around OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and etc. What's your advice/opinion on them?

And my second and probably last question is, should we edit directly from the cloud service or transfer the stuff that we'll need and just save the projects on cloud?

 

Thanks in advance!

This is definitely a personal preference question. Think about platforms, which do you use most often, Google Suite of apps, Microsoft Office apps (including Outlook), or iOS? If you use one of those more often, then it should be obvious which to go with. 

The are other options as well to consider Box, Amazon drive, iCloud Drive, Nextcloud, and others. Some of the big things to consider are price/storage, included features like password protected links, and who do you trust the most to share your files with? There's also options to purchase a NAS system that includes cloud access, but from my (limited) experience these can be clunky. 

I've used Dropbox for several years because I was able to get a bunch of free storage space early on by inviting friends, but around 2015 or so I started to pay for the service. I've stayed mostly for convenience and because I appreciate the features, but I am careful about what I store and I do not rely on it 100% for backing up my files (I also keep a local offline copy that I manually sync every few weeks). The price is higher than I'd like, but not so much (paid yearly) that it's forced me to consider changing platforms. 

On your second question, I think it will depend on the way you use the cloud storage and what platform. Google Drive is definitely okay to change in the Cloud, but I've seen issues with changing files on Dropbox using Microsoft Office if others are using the same document (not using a Teams account). If it's just you making changes (or unlikely for others to be working at the same time), then you are fine to make changes however you like. If you're collaborating with others, usually working in real-time together, then it's probably better to make changes online thru the cloud service. 

[xHashii]

56 minutes ago, burh4n said:

This is definitely a personal preference question. Think about platforms, which do you use most often, Google Suite of apps, Microsoft Office apps (including Outlook), or iOS? If you use one of those more often, then it should be obvious which to go with. 

The are other options as well to consider Box, Amazon drive, iCloud Drive, Nextcloud, and others. Some of the big things to consider are price/storage, included features like password protected links, and who do you trust the most to share your files with? There's also options to purchase a NAS system that includes cloud access, but from my (limited) experience these can be clunky. 

I've used Dropbox for several years because I was able to get a bunch of free storage space early on by inviting friends, but around 2015 or so I started to pay for the service. I've stayed mostly for convenience and because I appreciate the features, but I am careful about what I store and I do not rely on it 100% for backing up my files (I also keep a local offline copy that I manually sync every few weeks). The price is higher than I'd like, but not so much (paid yearly) that it's forced me to consider changing platforms. 

On your second question, I think it will depend on the way you use the cloud storage and what platform. Google Drive is definitely okay to change in the Cloud, but I've seen issues with changing files on Dropbox using Microsoft Office if others are using the same document (not using a Teams account). If it's just you making changes (or unlikely for others to be working at the same time), then you are fine to make changes however you like. If you're collaborating with others, usually working in real-time together, then it's probably better to make changes online thru the cloud service. 

Thank you for the detailed answer!

We're mostly going to use it for saving video editing stuff. So when a video is shot, the media will be uploaded and when we want to save at a certain point as a backup, we'll directly save it to cloud because we'll most likely add it as a mapped drive on both PCs. Just so you know, we are not in the same location/country so i think this is the easiest and non clunky way to do it in my opinion.

[burh4n]

On 5/19/2020 at 8:58 AM, xHashii said:

We're mostly going to use it for saving video editing stuff

Sounds like you're going to need a lot of storage, so price/GB might be the first aspect to evaluate across services.
 

On 5/19/2020 at 8:58 AM, xHashii said:

when we want to save at a certain point as a backup, we'll directly save it to cloud

Sounds like you won't be editing in the cloud then (guessing video editing will be on the local machine), so you could really use any option that best suits your needs. The big warning I'd say here is to make sure to coordinate who's working on what and when, or work on a local copy to push to the cloud during off times. 

 

On 5/19/2020 at 8:58 AM, xHashii said:

not in the same location/country so i think this is the easiest and non clunky way to do it in my opinion

Certainly a reasonable way to do it, but an additional offline daily/weekly backup could be beneficial as well. This means if the cloud service goes down (or internet), a file is accidentally corrupted, or some other web-based road block; you'll still have a local copy of your content (and may only lose a day or two of work, not all of it at once). Cloud storage is not considered a backup (think of worst case scenarios like a ransomware encryption that syncs to the cloud backup), so investing in another means of managed physical storage is highly recommended.
 

[xHashii]

@burh4nOf course! I was thinking of something like *Project Name (v1,v2,v3 etc) - <insert real name>*. I think this won't confuse us. Or of course,we can make 2 separate folders and just upload the updates.

 

Quote

Sounds like you won't be editing in the cloud then (guessing video editing will be on the local machine), so you could really use any option that best suits your needs. The big warning I'd say here is to make sure to coordinate who's working on what and when, or work on a local copy to push to the cloud during off times. 

You pretty much said it on point! We'll keep copies just in case.

 

Thanks so much for the answers! I think this would work well (not perfectly due to upload speeds) but acceptable.

[burh4n]

15 hours ago, xHashii said:

Thanks so much for the answers!

Glad to be of help 

[d4n-m]

On 5/19/2020 at 1:38 PM, xHashii said:

Hey guys!

 

What's the best/most worth cloud service? I've looked around OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and etc. What's your advice/opinion on them?

And my second and probably last question is, should we edit directly from the cloud service or transfer the stuff that we'll need and just save the projects on cloud?

 

Thanks in advance!

Might want to look into Backblaze B2 for storage + iconik for library management and video proxies if you're going to have multiple terabytes of video -> https://www.backblaze.com/b2/case-studies/fin-films/ 

[doommood]

Quote

What's the best/most worth cloud service? I've looked around OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and etc. What's your advice/opinion on them?

G Suite for Business costs $12 per month for a single user and features unlimited storage.

Wasabi and Backblaze cost $6 per month also for unlimited storage.