Use Copy for Cloud Storage Backup and File Sharing

[Jason A. Heppler is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Department of History at Stanford University and a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He tweets at @jaheppler.]

Recent announcements are showing a trend in cheaper storage solutions and cloud backups. Google recently updated its pricing for Drive storage and now offers 15 GB for free and incredibly cheap prices for 100 GB, 1 TB, and 10TB+. At WWDC, Apple announced changes to its iCloud service towards a more Dropbox-like experience and revealed a new pricing model that includes a baseline 20 GB for $0.99 per month. And just this week, Amazon revealed its plans for unlimited storage for photographs for those purchasing the new Fire Phone. Cloud storage, it seems, is everywhere and dirt cheap.

Allow me to throw another one on your desk to review. Among the newer cloud-based storage offerings is a service called Copy. I’ve been trying it out for the last few weeks, and so far I’ve found a lot to like. Similar to Dropbox, Copy syncs files from a local folder on your desktop to its cloud servers. So far, I haven’t noticed Copy being significantly slower than Dropbox. But the great advantage of Copy over Dropbox? You get 15 GB of space for free versus Dropbox’s 2 GB. And referrals grant you a whopping 5 GB per referral (versus Dropbox’s 500 MB) and, at least as of this writing, has no max bonus for referrals. If you need more storage, Copy’s paid plans start at $99 per year for 250 GB.

Copy syncs locally to your desktop much like Dropbox does. Drop items into your Copy folder (see image below) and they’ll sync anytime you’re on an Internet connection.

Copy has many similar features to Dropbox, including easy folder and file sharing with collaborators. However, unlike Dropbox where shared folders within your Dropbox account also count against your storage quota, Copy has implemented what they call “fair share.” Fair share splits the size of a shared folder evenly across the number of people you’ve shared with. For example, a 5 GB folder synced between you and a collaborator counts at 2.5 GB per person.

Copy provides easy ways to share files and folders, as well as review version history for individual files. (See image below.)

And like Dropbox, Copy syncs across various devices. Copy can be installed on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux. Dropbox currently has the market cornered on integration with mobile applications, but hopefully Copy will soon come to other applications. On top of that, Copy also has a web interface that is well designed and easy to use.

The web interface for Copy (see image below) is easy to navigate and upload or perform operations on files and folders.

If you’re in the market for a new cloud storage service, I would give Copy a chance!

Have you tried Copy? Have any use cases you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments!

[CC-licensed Flickr photo by theaucitron]