Technology at home
Work out what you need from cloud storage
Choosing a storage plan on price alone can leave you short on space or paying for features you never touch. Start with how much you store, who you share with, and how you would recover a deleted file, and the field narrows quickly.
A text to start with
Help me work out what I need from cloud storage. I have about 80 GB of photos and 20 GB of documents. I share folders with two family members and want files available offline on my laptop. I care about privacy and want to know what questions to ask about whether providers scan files. Recovering accidentally deleted files matters to me. My budget is around $15 a month. Give me a comparison framework and a list of questions to check with each provider.
Example request. Change the details to fit your situation.What to check in the answer
Treat any claim about a named provider's privacy practices as unverified until you read that provider's current terms. Policies change, and a summary can be out of date. Add up your files and confirm the plan covers the total with some room to grow. Version history length, deleted-file recovery windows, and prices are plan-specific, so confirm each on the provider's own pricing page.
What to do next
Open the official pricing and terms pages for each shortlisted provider and fill in the comparison yourself. Record the version history length and what the terms say about scanning or sharing data. If privacy matters most to you, ask a follow-up that uses privacy as the only criterion, then check its answer against the documents.