I currently have a windows 11 PC and a iPhone 14 Plus and a iPad. What does everyone recommend Google drive and Gmail or iCloud and iCloud email?
Thanks
Don
The benefits to going with iCloud is that you can pay for one subscription that will cover your email, device backups, and more. The benefits of going with the Google suite is that they tend to do a better job building cross platform apps. It really depends on what you value - either approach will work.
It depends on what you want. Business Google One provides a lot of features, such as the office suite, communication tools etc. and storage.
The free version of Gmail is financed by feeding Google’s advertising machine with your emails - they aren’t read by humans, but machines feed the data into the advertising algorithms. Free Gdrive possibly the same, hopefully paid Gdrive doesn’t.
Apple isn’t so excessive, as far as i am aware. I’ve not heard that they use the data for their advertising services and they say they don’t sell it to third parties.
iCloud Mail works as a traditional mail service, so works with IMAP smoothly. Gmail uses its own internal structure and tries to map this to IMAP, but there are some quirks. If you use the web version and the app on the iPhone and iPad, it works well. If you use a proper mail client, it isn’t can do funny things as it tries to convert labels into folders, but it is reliable and I think the problems are mostly sorted these days.
Google probably has the better cross platform support, if you aren’t using Mac, although Apple has just released new tools for Windows, which are supposed to be much better than the monolithic iTunes.
Personally, I have my own private email address, I use the iCloud one for Apple services, Gmail for signing up to less important services and some are on Hotmail/Outlook because I’ve used that for signups since the mid 90s, before Microsoft bought it.
I did use a third party storage service (Strato HiDrive) for a while, but I currently use OneDrive, although I am migrating away from it, as i don’t really need Office 365 any more and I am switching to iCloud, because I use several Apple services, so Apple One Family works out best for me.
At the end of the day, it comes down to which one you are more comfortable using and whether you want more privacy for your data or not - although I would say neither is completely private, it is a case of degrees, with Apple being, currently more trustworthy than Google, but both are huge corporations devoted to profit, not the needs of their users.
I have been using iCloud for a while now, I also use it for my email,which is routed through iCloud and hide my email.
I have used other cloud services as well. The least user friendly is Amazon cloud and Google drive.
I realised when I tried to move/download multiple of the photos I had stored there. It is just impossible.
You have to go through them one by one if you want to release space or anything else and it’s quite a chore.
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I’d look at what you do on those devices and test the software that integrates with their cloud storage and if it works for you. You can do this before you subscribe as there are free tiers.
I mix and match. Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android here. Currently using OneDrive, Google, iCloud and Amazon.
OneDrive is my main cloud storage, the family are using the 1TB each you get with the O365 subscription. Most of my work is on my Windows laptop, so reliable file-level integration with cloud storage is important to me. IME Apple’s software is buggy on Windows and I would not trust it to sync reliably.
Google is there because we use Gmail, Android backups, plus I also use Google Photos on Android.
iCloud for my wife’s photos and her iOS backups.
Amazon comes with Prime, and I use it for photo storage, which also integrates nicely with Amazon devices (Fire TVs, Echo Shows…) @nickapos you can get direct access to the files stored on Amazon from a PC. Do bulk moves, copies, deletes etc.
Wish we could consolidate into one!
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Yeah, the problem is I am not a windows user and for Linux things are pretty tough. OneDrive and iCloud work ok from a browser. The rest not so much.
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Ah OK. Yes, I use the Amazon Photos Windows desktop app to backup my photo folders to their cloud, and I can then manage those folders using their web interface.
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