Evolution of cloud storage one sole trader / 1 person 1 business (for me, anyway)

Hi all,

Just thought I’d share the way I work, perhaps it’ll be helpful or someone might make a suggestion.

I’ve been self-employed for some time now, and the ‘money saving’ activity doesn’t stop, no matter how busy you get.

So my work involves small files in general (CAD/3D, currently 4,000 files), with a burst of larger files (video/pictures/renders). Many years ago, I recommended dropbox to many people, giving me 20GB FREE of storage, which was great. Unfortunately as time has gone by, I started getting close to this limit, so I opted for ‘offing’ my media files to normal storage (backed up of course).

More time went by and I found myself needing access to the media files with a bit more convenience than going to the office - I wanted them from my laptop has well (used off-site and at home). So I went for Google Drive (100GB), because it only cost a few pounds a month (2.5 dollars’ish).

Now up to the present. I’m finding the juggling of files to become more than I can bear, so I’ve just signed up for a trial of G Suite. Never thought I’d do this, because I prefer the way dropbox works and always have done. But the maths is pretty good, I think it’s £9.20 (at the moment!) which is around 12 bucks, and it gives me 1TB of storage - which is more than enough for ALL of my working files, for a very long time. The only next concern will be upgrading my primary SSD (currently 2 are 256GB and the laptop is 512GB), but that was needed anyway…though I’m not looking forward to doing that. I do have spinning rust on some machines, so it’s not the end of the world - I just like shortcut’ing regular folders so that the shortcuts work on all machines.

From a Gmail point of view, not much will change as I’ve used a fiddle to make my ‘work’ emails look as if they’re sent professionally. The only benefit I can think of, that will be nice, will be when I print emails. It won’t have my personal email address on it, but the proper new business address on it…I won’t have to photoshop that out anymore. Jeez, the corners we get ourselves into eh! Oh, something that’s annoying is apparently I can’t sign in to youtube as a g suite users…but I guess I only need to log in as admin and give myself that privilege! :slight_smile:

I’m only on a 14 day trial of G suite and had 1 day so far, nothing to write home about. It does have an app maker which I might play with if I want your average Joe to have a terrible app experience :slight_smile: The admin was a bit weird, I have to say. For example I wanted to change my profile picture, but I had to log in as admin to give myself the privilege of doing it. I guess it’s a system more designed for tens or hundreds of users all under the control of one dark overlord (that’s either Google or the biz manager whichever way you want to look at it). I’m just a one man band, so it’s pretty simple and I have no ambitions to expand, it’s just too much brain work for my liking. I’ve employed people before but it seemed that it took me an hour to explain something I could have done in, oh, I’d say an hour :thinking:

I have just been reminded of 1and1…oh, I mean ioioioios or whatever they want to be called these days. I’d be tempted, but it uses that OneDrive which I have no idea why, but I don’t like it. Pretty bad considering that I haven’t used it. I think I became annoyed when setting up other peoples PC’s and wanted to remove the quick link to it, and couldn’t (unless I REGEDIT).

Yeah, I guess it would be nice to have Office included and after the price went up to £7+VAT a month, it would be comparable in price and have the added bonus of Office. I do have Office as a software Install, and I’m pretty happy with that…it may be an old copy though (2007-2010) but still works fine and dandy.

Hosting-wise though, it appears I can still create new email addresses and break the domain if needed, so that’s always nice that the Big G didn’t take it over completely, only the MX details. I’m also figuring now, that I’ll be more white listed than I was before, so that’ll be nice. “Sorry, I didn’t get your emailed invoice, it went into my spam”…humph!

So there you go, do contribute if it’s something that interests you :+1:

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Biiiiit of an update…my original domain host has completely transferred mx / email management to Google, so I now can’t create new email accounts or email forwards.

Am contacting Gmail to see if they have a replacement system, where I can create email addresses but they’re only forwards and not proper user accounts.

Ah ha! You can create email forwards, or ‘alias’ as Google like to say. Phew. Limited to 30 but that’s more than enough.

Now I was a bit annoyed that I wouldn’t be able to ‘send as’ another email address. But a quick fiddle, you can.

I’m finding it difficult to find fault with G suite to be honest…apart from having to spend money.

Another little update. Just to help others prepare, I have around 15GB of emails and using the G Suite migration tool, it’s so far taken 2 days to copy over 20% of those email.

Yet another addition and more about Google backup in general. At first, I thought I would need a backup file downloaded, then restored back to the new Google account. One of the option was maximum file size and it suggested 2GB due to OS file size limitations (although to my mind, that’s more with older OS’s). So I selected 2GB and this is the outcome…not very 2GB size really?