cloud storage – Ask Ursula

You take lots of photos on your smartphone and one day you get a message that your cloud storage
(Google Photos or iCloud) is full, and you should buy more storage. What does it mean?
Your phone is usually set up to back up your photos to ‘the cloud’ (imagine a huge harddrive somewhere
in the world where everyone has some storage space allocated to them). That way, if something happens
to your phone, you don’t lose the photos and can download them again onto a different device. The
problem is that the storage space is limited and once it is full, nothing else will be saved to it.
You can do one of two things: move the photos from your phone to your computer, if you have one (I
wrote about that some time ago, and you can access this and my other articles on Dropbox – the link is
on my Facebook page); or you can buy more storage. This sounds a bit scary, but it is actually not all that
expensive.
Just a few examples (prices are approximate as of mid 2024):
iCloud gives you 5 GB for free, upgrade to 50 GB for about $18/year or 200 GB for around $55/year.
Google gives you 15 GB for free, upgrade to 100 Gb for about $25/year or 200 GB for $45/year.
OneDrive(Microsoft) gives you 5 GB for free, upgrade to 100 GB for $30/year or 1 TB (1000 GB) for
$110/year.
There are others like Dropbox or pCloud and more and all can be set up to save your photos (and
sometimes other files) automatically and usually come with some extras.
1 GB can store about 300–400 photos, videos use more storage space.