Unlimited cloud storage sounds a little too good to be true, and does come with caveats. Some that we've seen in the wild include ‘cold storage’ - or delayed access to files - and being charged a fee for each device you want to back up, or per terabyte of storage space.
That said, some tantalising offers do exist, and at TechRadar Pro, you’ll find more unlimited cloud storage providers and offers than anywhere else on the web. Plus, we’ve made it our mission to update this page at least once a month.
Unlimited cloud storage - like lifetime cloud storage - is part of the cloud storage ecosystem and, functionally, can be compared to cloud backups.
It's also, like lifetime cloud storage, aimed at heavy business use, or solo professionals with the money to burn. It's March 2024 right now, meaning that deals are springing up in line with the season, but even with that in mind, it's important that you determine whether unlimited cloud storage is something that suits your use case.
In this article, we'll be using cloud backup and cloud storage as interchangeable terms even if there are some notable differences between the two. Read our article on Cloud backup vs Cloud Storage for more information.
Per Google Trends, search for “unlimited cloud storage” has slightly decreased in popularity over the past few years after a number of big players (most notably, Bitcasa and Google Photos) stopped using no-limit cloud storage as a unique selling point for their services, almost certainly for their own financial reasons.
Not all of the best unlimited cloud storage deals on the market right now are from the obvious big-hitter providers, so we've done our best to put them under the spotlight.
- If we’ve missed any unlimited cloud storage service or if one of the ones listed below no longer offers unlimited cloud storage, ping me an email on desire.athow@futurenet.com.
What is unlimited cloud storage?
In theory, It is cloud storage with no limits in capacity, file format and file size. However, there are always restrictions as to what you can and can’t do. That’s because cloud storage service providers have finite resources: fixed bandwidth to and from the data center where hard disk drives are stored, fixed number of bytes per hard drive and fixed number of hard disks. Check out our perspective on no-limit cloud storage.
Why do companies offer unlimited cloud storage?
Simples! Companies offer unlimited cloud storage because it is a powerful marketing argument, a valid selling point not only in cloud storage but also in web hosting (unlimited bandwidth) and in mobile phone contracts (unlimited minutes, unlimited data downloads, unlimited text). Heck! Even businesses offer unlimited holidays to reduce turnover and attract new talent. What they bet on is that customers won’t be uploading tens of terabytes of data. Unlimited cloud storage depends very much on how much data you can upload at any time and this has a physical limit based on your connection.
Is unlimited cloud storage really unlimited?
Like anything that’s unlimited, service providers bank on a number of different things to happen, most importantly though, they do not expect customers to max out the service. As is usually the case with unlimited-type services that follow Bell curve normal probability distribution, most users will be located in the middle of the curve with a few outliers. These outliers are the ones that are the costliest for the service providers; they can deploy an array of limitations ranging from bandwidth throttling (how much data you can move per unit time).
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