Copy

Copy
31 Jul 13

Those of you reading this post probably fall into two camps. You either dislike and distrust cloud storage or you love it. I’m the latter. I’m currently signed up to every solution out there, Dropbox, Google Drive and I even pay SkyDrive for a smidge of additional storage as well as having bits and bobs spread across other services.

Now all of these services have their ups and downs whether it be storage amounts, applications and access and in my honest opinion there is no perfect solution but I have been trialing a new service that seems to even the odds.

Copy is a cloud storage solution with a little bit of an edge so let’s mention it right away. You get 15GB of free storage right off the bat. But that’s not all. Sign up for a free account and you’ll be given a referral link. Share this link with your friends and for everyone you get to sign up they’ll get an additional 5GB of storage so 20GB free right away and you’ll also have 5GB added to your account for each person that joins. So far I have my initial 15GB upgraded to over 40GB. There are also other little incentives such as posting to Twitter much in the same way that Dropbox does but Copy actually rewards you with as much storage as Dropbox offers for this for a free account in its entirety. You can also check your referral status via the web site. It can become quite addictive.

Copy

And that's is the whole point of Copy, it’s all about sharing. From the web interface you can simply drag a file to your browser and instantly share it with someone via email or your favourite social network.

You can also share files in groups but if you are sharing the same file between multiple people Copy doesn't penalise each of you for the space used for said file. They call this fair storage savings and in their own words this equates to...

“We believe in a simple concept of fairness. Everyone paying for the same data they are sharing doesn't work for us. We think that’s like going to dinner together and everyone having to pay the entire bill. People sharing content should equally divide the amount of storage being used. With Copy, you can split the bill. So a 12 GB folder shared between 3 people only counts as 4 GB per person.”

As you can see this refers to a paid option but their plans are pretty good compared to competitors. 250GB will set you back $9.99/month or $99/year and if you want full fat you’d be forking out $14.99/month or $149/year for 500GB so very comparable if not better to most providers out there.

And there’s apps. Copy is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, iOS and Android. The desktop and mobile apps work in pretty much the same way as their counterparts but by now I guess you get the idea.

So it’s nothing revolutionary but it brings a few more frills to the table and if you want a generous cloud alternative that you control then this might well be worth a look.

Author

Paul Wright

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