Friday 14 March 2014

Google Drive starts price war on online storage

According to their blog, today Google released cheaper pricing on their Drive product, Google's version of online cloud storage. What is Google Drive I hear you ask? Find out here.

Prices have dropped significantly, to the point where an extra 100gig of data, on top of your free 15gb will cost you less than $2 per month. This is very aggressively priced against the other online cloud storage providers such as Dropbox and OneDrive which I wrote about yesterday.

For so much storage at such a low price, it's a great option to have all your photos, music, videos, documents, files, stuff... whatever really saved in a secondary spot and available all the time in case anything happens and you lose your files. An 80% discount on a terabyte of data for less than $10 per month is a real bargain and an absolute must if you can't afford to lose any files.



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Thursday 13 March 2014

Setup OneDrive to automatically sync everything in the Documents folder

If you've got Windows, and you tend to use more than one computer or device like a tablet, then keeping your documents in sync is a great way to make sure you're always working on the latest file.

The new version of Microsoft Office 2013 has this functionality already built in, enabling users to create and save documents straight to and from OneDrive (formerly known as SkyDrive). But what about all those other documents you'd also like to access? Examples including files you've received from an email or documents you've downloaded from a website.

Usually many users will save these files to their documents folder. So now, you've got your Office files saved in your OneDrive and everything else is in a folder on one computer not accessible by other computers. Well that's about to change.

If you set your "Documents" folder location on your PC to be your OneDrive location, everything saved in this folder will be synchronised with the cloud. Here's how to do it.

Assuming you have OneDrive installed on your PC already (or SkyDrive if it hasn't updated yet!), right click on the documents folder in the file explorer, and choose properties (as shown below, click to enlarge picture).
In the properties window, choose the location tab, then choose move. In the box that appears, double click OneDrive (or SkyDrive depending), and then select the documents folder inside (one click), and then choose "select folder" when it's highlighted.
Once done, hit ok. Now all the files in the "Documents" folder will be saved on OneDrive, so you never have to worry about losing your documents.
Now if you sign into OneDrive on your smartphone, tablet or another computer, all of your documents will be readily available.

Pro Tip: Microsoft gives you 7GB of free storage with OneDrive, which should be plenty for documents and related files, as text type files such as spreadsheets, presentations and text documents are relatively small in terms of file size. So it is important to make sure you only store documents in there and you should have enough space. Example, make sure music files (such as pesky iTunes library files) aren't saved in your "Documents" as this can take up lots of space quickly.

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