Tech Talk: Clouds with a silver lining

MOST of us now have a drawer full of handy USB drives containing random assortments of snapshots from our lives: documents, photos, music, you name it. Which is handy, until you discover that they’re not in the drawer you thought they were, and that in fact you have no idea where they might be. Handier still would be a drive that you didn’t have to put anywhere, because it lived out on the internet; one which you could access at any time, from any computer, phone or tablet.

The good news is that the biggest technology companies are currently falling over themselves to offer you just that. You can upload anything you like to their servers in the sky and keep it there until you need it. They call it cloud storage.

Two most prominent services are Google’s G-drive and its rival SkyDrive, from Microsoft. Microsoft gives you seven gigabytes of storage and Google five. You don’t have to choose between them; you can sign up for both. You can also opt for services like Dropbox, which has been around long enough to have been integrated into other programmes – with the advantage that your data can be saved there automatically.

All the cloud storage services work on a similar principle: you install programmes or apps on your computers and devices, which synchronise themselves with your space in the cloud. This means, in theory, that your files are always at your fingertips – but ironically, the apps sometimes take up as much space as the files themselves. This is an issue on phones and tablets, where space is often at a premium.

Google’s and Microsoft’s services also try to tie you into using their other products, and there are compatibility issues between documents and spreadsheets you have created in Word, Excel and Google Docs. For similar reasons, G-Drive works better on Android phones (which Google developed) and SkyDrive favours Windows phones (which Microsoft controls but which almost no-one actually uses).

SkyDrive doesn’t have apps available at all for Android phones nor even for Windows XP, but you can still access your files through a standard web browser. That’s better when space is precious or if you’re using a works computer.

With all the services, you can share documents with other users, which is often a better option than email. And Google, Microsoft and Dropbox will sell you more space if it runs low.