HACKER Q&A
📣 burnieflanders

Google Drive vs iCloud – which is best for personal files/photos/videos?


I'm moving ~20 years of my personal photos, videos, and files from external hard disks to a cloud. Motivation: a damaged/lost/stolen SSD could lose my precious memories forever.

I'm an iPhone/mac user (no iCloud for photo/videos, just contacts and a few very small things that makes moving to a new iPhone easier). But I also use Google Drive a lot.

I'm from a country with terribly slow upload speeds, and I've got 10 days in a country with high upload speeds, so I'll try to make a decision soon.

For a fairly important decision, I find surprisingly little useful comparisons online.

The most useful has been a youtube comment [1]:

> The biggest difference is that iCloud is a sync service, whereas Drive is a backup and sync service. Being able to store things and delete them from your device while still having the option to sync specific folders across devices makes Drive superior to both iCloud and OneDrive.

This makes me lean toward google drive.

Your thoughts one this are greatly appreciated.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=794VnvYuJ5c


  👤 amerkhalid Accepted Answer ✓
Always keep local copy that is not writeable by iCloud/Google Drive.

I use iCloud and Adobe Lightroom. In LR, I make sure that it keeps full resolution photos on a removable drive. Then I back up that drive to a NAS once week or so. Backup folder on NAS is mounted only during backup.


👤 flaburgan
Hello, the question may sound out of topic but have you considered open source solution such as Nextcloud? Personally I found privacy very important and that's what I picked. It was clearly not at the same level than Google drive at the beginning but it improved a lot those past years and is now very good in my opinion.

👤 k310
Apple has real support people you can speak to in person.

👤 aosaigh
I wouldn’t consider either a backup service. If your primary concern is losing your data, use Backblaze instead, or use Timemachine or a NAS with Carbon Copy Cloner.

FWIW I use iCloud, but as a sync service so I can access files on iPad and iPhone.


👤 aynyc
My family actually pay for both. So we get two backups of our photos & videos. We did that just in case big tech decides to ban us for some random reason.

👤 mapasj
Is price a factor? Google Drive and iCloud are more expensive than using raw storage from a Cloud services provider, like AWS or GCP.

👤 leros
I love Google Photos but I hate that there isn't a good way to make an easy backup. Your photos used to be a folder in Google Drive that you could sync to a local NAS but that option is gone now.

👤 brudgers
Motivation: a damaged/lost/stolen SSD could lose my precious memories forever.

Sure a declined/canceled/expired credit card might be less likely. But I wouldn’t bet on it over a few years. Much less several decades.

Good luck.