Cloud storage enables access to files and folders from any location with an internet connection, eliminating the limitations of local network storage. This content covers how cloud storage works and compares four widely used platforms: Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and Amazon Web Services S3.
Cloud Storage
There's a lot of advantages to taking our files and folders and storing them in some sort of cloud storage. That might give us access wherever we go, whether we're working remotely or maybe we're traveling, and still having access to those files and folders no matter what.
Here's an example of what a home network might look like. What we have is maybe a file server on there, or maybe we have a computer, but the problem is we may have access to those if we're on a computer on the local area network, but we might not have access to that if we go traveling and go somewhere else. What we could do is use cloud storage.
Cloud storage saves things up in the internet, or the worldwide web, or however you want to view that. The cloud represents the internet, where all of our data is being transferred back and forth. There's still a physical machine out there, there's still some place where your data is being stored. There's some sort of network attached storage or file server or something to that effect up in the cloud that's storing your data, but we represent it as a cloud because we're not exactly sure where it's at and where it's being stored at. Since it's up in the cloud, in the internet, we have access no matter where we travel to, as long as we have some sort of data connection.
I've got four examples of cloud storage that I use on a regular basis. One of them is Dropbox right here, another one is Office 365 OneDrive, another one is Google Drive, and another one is an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket. They serve a very different purpose for me. Some of them have a little bit of overlap with how I use them.
Dropbox I feel like is an amazing company. They specialize in this type of cloud storage, that's what they do, and so it really is a way to streamline. I install the client on multiple laptops or multiple machines that I have, and then whenever I drop a folder into one of the Dropbox folders, then it shows up on all of those machines, and it does syncing really well. I will say that these other two here do syncing fairly well as well, although Dropbox has been doing it excellent for a long time. So I love Dropbox and I use it on a regular basis.
Next up we have OneDrive. This is a Microsoft product right here, and OneDrive is cloud storage. It's great for if you're doing any kind of Microsoft documents. What I find is that Microsoft documents were a little rocky from the cloud perspective at first, because they weren't designed to be in the cloud, the cloud came later, but they've really ironed out a lot of how it operates. So I'm pretty happy with how OneDrive operates now at this point. I think that Microsoft documents, like if I wanted to create a Word document here — Word documents, Excel workbook, PowerPoint presentation — are superior in the feature sets that they offer. I love using these. This is all part of Microsoft Office 365, and I think it's a great offering, and I use it for when I really want to get granular in my documents and how I control the documents and how I share it out.
Next up we have Google Drive, and I probably use Google Drive the most. It's built in the cloud and so it's really seamless in the way it works and how you can share out your documents, so I think it's great. I've used the syncing client before and I'm not a huge fan of it. Most of my documents are Google Documents, so I probably use this one the most out of all three of these options that I've just mentioned. I think it's great, although it's not really feature rich like Microsoft is. So if you really want to have control over your documents, I like Microsoft better than Google, but if you really want to have availability through this web interface, Google has been doing it for a long time. So I do like Google Drive quite a bit.
There's another cloud storage that I'm going to show you. It's not used as much for users, it's more for businesses, and that is in Amazon Web Services. You create these buckets, and then you can share out the buckets to either your internal infrastructure if it's built up in S3, or you can actually just create a web page using one of these buckets and set it up as a web page and put HTML files in there. I'm not going to go through the whole process for creating these, but this is just an example of how I can create more of an enterprise level storage. S3 is amazing for what it is. I don't use it as much anymore because I don't have a need to share out a lot of files via an enterprise level system like this, but I love Amazon Web Services. I've used it for years, and at my last company I migrated everything to Amazon Web Services. I think it's a great system to use, but it's very different than Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox in that, once again, it's really designed more for sharing out files on an enterprise level, not on a user level. So it's meant for more enterprise systems like servers, or like I say, web pages.
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