Which Cloud Service Will Work For Me?

MacClurg from Rochester, NY writes:

I operate from a home office and am considering uploading all my “Documents” about 13mb, to the cloud as a reliable back up system. I have an external HD but don’t trust it will work properly if my desk top HD fails. What is the most reliable cloud program to use? I would like to have the same file orientation as my MS system displays now. I would like my desk top files and the cloud files to update automatically as I change them. Thank you.

There are multiple cloud services out there and most of them are pretty reliable. There’s Microsoft’s OneDrive, DropBox, Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive and Mozy to name a few. For your needs, I think I’d suggest the Microsoft OneDrive.

You don’t seem to require a lot of storage space right now, so the 7GB you get for free just for signing up should work well for you. If you happen to subscribe to Office 365, you’ll get even more free space.

No matter which service you select, it won’t change the nature of your files. Your cloud storage simply stores the information just like a flash drive or a hard drive. If you save a MS Word document to the cloud and open it in MS Word, it will be exactly the same.

Signing up is simple. If you already have an Outlook.com, MSN, HotMail or LiveMail address, you already have an account. Just go to Outlook.com to log in with your e-mail address and password. To sign up for a new account, go to Outlook.com and create a Microsoft account.

 If you use Office 2013 or Office 365, you’ll find that Word will default to saving documents to the cloud. I have my computer set up to save my Word documents to the cloud and also save a copy of those OneDrive documents to my hard drive as well. You can learn how that works by clicking here.

Saving to or opening a document from OneDrive is just like using any other drive on a computer.  You select OneDrive instead of a folder or external drive.

I have been very happy with OneDrive, using it to access my documents on my computer, phone and tablet and also on other computers.

~ Cynthia