KDrive – A Viable alternative to Google One and iCloud

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KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.

With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.

Simple Synchronisation

With KDrive you have a folder that is synched automatically from your device to the cloud, and from the cloud to another device. If you decide to move your images from one device to another you can do so by requesting that the images are downloaded, and eventually they will be synced. This is a key selling point.

Google One

With Google One you have two terabytes, which are shared between photos, file folders, e-mail and more. They are however, separated. You can access all of the files that you uploaded as files, but you cannot access all of your photos and download them easily. In the past I tried to download images from Google Drive and I found that I was blocked by how many hours it takes to download zip file after zip file for days at a time. This is not a good solution despite being cheaper than iCloud.

iCloud and Price

Aside from the size of the HD you need on your mac laptop or iOS device to download your galleries you also need to pay 120 CHF per year, in perpetuity. With Apple device you pay a premium for the phone, for the laptop but then you pay a premium for the apps, for the services and more. Apple wants 120 CHF per year to keep your data safe, when drives of that capacity are going down in price every single year. I object to paying a tax of sorts, every year, when I have already payed a premium for the products.

KDrive

KDrive, by Infomaniak, based in Switzerland has a number of advantages. The first is that the company is local, so it feels good to support a local effort rather than the giants. The second reason is that their price point is half as much as their competition, especially if you commit to two or three years. The third selling point is that all the files are accessible as if they were already on your local machine. This means that within a short period of time you can recover the files you want to recover, or backup the files that you want to backup.

Features

In the settings you have photo backup, and within this you can enable automatic backup but what makes this one different is that you can choose where to save the images, including which folder. It also creates directory by month and year. This makes it easy for you to find images when you are looking for them.. I like that you can select to upload photos, videos, screenshots and even delete photos once they are backed up, although this is in beta.

I like these features because I don't want to backup videos because they're heavy and take time to load, but also because they are not relevant to my photos. I prefer to take care of them separately. No other service offers the option to exclude videos.

Another great feature is that you can choose whether to sync your photos from "now" or all. That is useful. If you're on a trip and you just want to backup recent pictures then that's a useful feature. If you have all the time in the world, and enough battery life, then you can sync your entire image library. The fact that you can exclude video initially speeds up the process considerably.

For more information about KDrive. The Prices.

And Finally

Google Drive and iCloud complicate rather than simplify your life, when you are dealing with photos. KDrive simplifies it. If you can migrate your photos away from Google Drive and iCloud to a solution that is more user friendly then you can also reduce the amount of space you need on your devices, as you have offloaded them to the cloud, but then the files that were offloaded to the cloud can be synced your local machine seamlessly. As a media asset manager I greatly appreciate this.

KDrive is now a speedy and efficient solution for the sharing of files, with some intelligent features for the backing up of your phones' photo galleries. I am in the process of doing that now. I hesitated with other services in the past, but to me this is a clear winner.