As noted on several occasions, with cloud storage services it is possible to keep the most important and most used files online and always available so that they can also be opened from mobile phones, smartphones and other computers. The main commercial cloud storage services such as Skydrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and Sugarsync offer the possibility to register for free and get a limited free space to be used as you wish.
Almost all of these services allow you to increase this space for free, thus adding hundreds of MB for your cloud storage, if you are promoting and if you invite other people to try the product.
Let's see how we can maximize the space in cloud storage permanently and free of charge .
In the end, all inclusive, you can get almost 100 GB for your personal cloud where you can save videos, photos, music, documents and all types of files safely and without risk of them being deleted.
READ FIRST: best cloud services compared
1) Dropbox at the time of registration offers 2 GB of free space which are objectively few.
Dropbox however allows, quite generously, to increase this space for free and reach up to 20GB forever.
After logging in you can access this page which lists the tasks to be done to earn this additional space.
- Invite Friends to register a new account on Dropbox.
This allows you to get 500 MB of free space every time someone creates an account using the referral link provided to them.
This way you can earn a maximum of 16GB.
- Camera Upload : if you install Dropbox on your mobile phone, you can enable the function to upload the photos taken directly to Dropbox to save them online (very convenient not to lose them if the phone breaks).
With this you gain another 3GB of free space.
- Social Media : By connecting the Dropbox account to Facebook and sending a tweet on Twitter you can get 125 MB + 125 MB.
I remember that it is possible to share files in Facebook groups with Dropbox.
- Take the tour and follow the introductory guide to gain another 250 MB of free space.
- Participate in tests or in certain promotional games which in recent years have allowed users to earn up to 5 GB more space.
To know when these games come out, you just have to follow the technology blogs.
2) Onedrive, ex Skydrive, from Microsoft starts with a large space of 7 GB and offers an app for Android and iPhone with 3 Giga of photo backup.
If it was used before the SkyDrive restyling of April 22, 2012, you can update your account from 5 GB to 25 GB by checking on this page.
You can get other GB of free space by inviting friends to sign up and use OneDrive.
READ ALSO: Ways to use the online space of cloud services for different purposes
3) By entering Google Drive you get 5 GB of free space and there are no ways to get more.
However, it must be considered that Google Drive has a different occupied space count than all other cloud storage.
It should therefore be noted that:
- Use Google Docs : files stored in Google Docs format (documents, spreadsheets and presentations) do not count in the global limit.
This means that if you save documents online it is certainly worth using Google Drive because when converted to Docs format there is no space limit.
- Photos : There is a big advantage also for photos saved online in Google Drive.
Meanwhile, the 5 GB of space are shared between Google Drive and Google+ Photos (the former Picasa Web Album).
Photos and videos of a certain size do not count in the storage limits (see here for more information)
You can therefore save an unlimited number of photos and videos for free.
- Gmail : we have seen that it is possible to send attachments in Gmail up to 10 GB using Google Drive.
Attachments sent with Gmail do not contribute to form the 5GB space of Google Drive and are more.
- Purchase a Chromebook, the laptop with the Chrome OS operating system, also brings 100 GB of extra space on Google Drive for two years.
3) You can double the cloud space by synchronizing files between various services as explained in another article.
4) pCloud is one of the most powerful and least known cloud storage.
The free account offers 20 GB of storage space.
5) Box is the most generous cloud storage service of all.
Registration starts with only 5 GB of free space, however the promotions lead to free upgrades even up to 50GB.
In the past it was enough to install the Box application on iPhone or Android to get immediately to 25GB.
Currently, for example, you can open a 15 GB Box account from this promotional link //cloud.box.com/signup/o/teambox
Every now and then it is better to search for the frequent Box promotions so that you can take advantage of accounts with more space.
It should be noted that Box is a more limited service and is less flexible and with a limit on the single file that can be loaded on the Internet from 250 MB.
READ ALSO: how to unify the clouds by managing them from a single program .
