Suffering (no more) from my laptop's disk space limitation

Everyone who uses a laptop has a natural limitation of disk space. Since, in the smallest computers, disks have ceased to be disks and have become solid ( SSD ), this problem has become much worse.

This happened - more or less - at the same time as cloud storage proliferated. But what was once innovation ended up becoming a commodity. Today there are numerous cloud storage services and the most difficult part has become managing them.

Retiring the USB stick and looking for alternatives

Of course, we liked it when we were able to, almost entirely, retire our USB sticks. But cloud storage has created a number of problems as well. For me, who uses a laptop with an SSD, the biggest problem was always that my disk was small and my disk space in the cloud was larger than what was available on the computer. That's why I've always had to manage this issue with Dropbox selective sync.

The fact is that I never liked selective sync, as you have to enter a hidden panel to select what you want to see at the moment. In addition, he has to wait for the synchrony of the folder. If the file to be synced is large, Dropbox will queue you with no management over.

Whoops! I just saw that I see that it has a "smart sync" plan at USD 199/year.

Dropping Dropbox

By this I mean that I am totally convinced that Dropbox is no longer a place for me. This price is out of (my) reality, so much so that I won't even get to test the service.

Anyway, even though I was a plus (paid) user of Dropbox for a few years, I realized that the company had no plans to solve what for me was a real problem. On the contrary, Dropbox was just creating much more expensive additional services, few of which I was interested in and none that could fit in my pocket. Then the day came to downgrade my Dropbox.

I don't think there is an easy solution to this. My solution was not very easy or rational, as I decided to pay - the same as I already paid in Dropbox - for a service that I used in the free plan. Maybe I did it to get "revenge" on Dropbox and its strategy that ignores ordinary people and those on a budget. At least it ignores people of this type who are able to reorganize themselves and find another better service for the same price. 💪👊

Innovative options: oDrive and Google Drive

The proposal of the oDrive It's simple and has many competitors: it's an application for managing your multiple drives in the cloud. So you can have several Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. accounts on your computer. In my case, I had a Google Drive account at work and a personal one, so I always had to choose one of them. I can now have all the accounts simultaneously on my laptop, making use of what some call "cloud unification".

What about the paid plan? The paid plan of oDrive allows you, in addition to syncing multiple accounts, to have the option to unsync each of their folders. The usability is perfect and you can navigate through the folders choosing what to download and what to return to the cloud, freeing up your precious disk space on your laptop.

Well, it's still an expensive service without a doubt. A competitor named ExpanDrive It seems to offer a more affordable plan. It is no coincidence that the price of oDrive is the same as Dropbox's mid-range plan, which reinforces that it is a reference for the market. The fact is that at least now I subscribe to a service that seems to be aligned with my interest. My interest at the moment is to explore Dropbox's free plans and its con 😇

And, for those of you who have a corporate Google account, there is the File Stream , which solves a similar problem at no additional cost. The problem that the tool solves, in fact, is that of selective synchrony, not that of managing multiple accounts. But, as the space provided by Google is quite generous, it is a possible solution for you who want to keep your notebook's disk space in order.