dropbox2My favorite is Dropbox. I especially like the Packrat feature for “Pro” customers who’ve paid an extra $39 a year for it. Packrat lets me conjure up a previous version of a file no matter how old. Alas, it isn’t available any longer for new customers. But they can still recover files deleted within the past 30 days or buy for the Extended Version History add-on, which goes back a year.

Not everyone is as gung ho on Dropbox, and over at the Next Web site, reporter Owen Williams makes the anti-Dropbox case. Sorry, Owen. I’ll keep Dropboxin’. Works for me. It’s worth every penny.

So which cloud service are you yourself using to store e-books and for other purposes—and what are the pros and cons, especially for e-books?

And if you’re not using any cloud service, let’s hear about the reason, whether the issue is privacy or something else.

7 COMMENTS

  1. None.

    I don’t trust cloud storage to be there when I need it.

    I have all of my books, music, and other data files backed up on two separate 500 GB portable hard disks. These are stored separately, away from my computer room, so that any thief is unlikely to steal both the PC and both backups.

  2. Dropbox as it works well with Linux. Calibre Library is stored on my netbook and I export every book into my Dropbox folder then sync it back to my tablet.

    Webdav based storage takes a bit more work and Google drive stopped working under Linux earlier this year.

  3. I don’t use a cloud service. Mainly due to privacy and lack of trust in any of the services available. Plus I do keep back up copies of my ebooks, photos and other documents – having had a laptop stolen reinforced that need!

  4. You need to think about WHY you are storing your ebooks on the cloud. The choice of cloud service (or, at least, the style in which you interact with it) depends on the answer. I use the cloud for:
    1. Accessibility: I sync my Calibre library with DropBox so that different devices can access it. I used to use Google Drive for this, but suffered repeated problems. (Note that the Calibre FAQ says “if you put your calibre library in Google Drive, **you will suffer data loss**.” My experience confirms this. Simple operations like fixing a misspelled author name often resulted in the loss of the actual .epub file.)
    2. Backup: I use a cloud backup service (Code42) for all of my data, including my ebook library. You don’t want to use a “sync”-style service for backup, because if you accidentally delete a book, that deletion gets sync’ed to the copy on the cloud and it’s gone forever.

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