I once subscribed in a cloud service in the internet, free of charge. I wanted to upload the whole contents of a partition, so I gave the cloud the mount point of it. But I found I couldn't. No more than NN files. So I began to make a huge tarball of it all. First I had to automatize the thing, and in this I lost so much time I finally quit.

What are the names of a pair of good cloud services (free of charge). And could I upload, say, an MP4 1GB in size? More generally, could I use it in the manner of a second hard disk, and send every file I download or create to the cloud? The ideal, when I'm for instance downloading a file via torrent, would be the file/files going directly to the cloud and not first to the hard disk and from this to the cloud.

the "cloud" is a hard disk .. just someone else's for one. Finding free storage online is a, you have to look around using "free online storage" or use other key words in what it is you're looking for. Yes, you have to save it on your hard drive first. Because of the means it needs to use to connect to that other hard drive on the internet in order to save it on that other hard drive.


edit: oh yes, mount point, no. directories on your mount point. yes. Unless other wise specified by the service provider.

without diving into "gave the cloud the mount point of it."

My Professional "clouds" extend to Azure, Amazon, VMWare,and others using open and closed source tools.
My personal "cloud" is a high capacity USB.

I suggest you "free online storage" at any search engine.

dropbox comes to mind.

Good Luck!

I use Dropbox. Its free tier will handle a 1GB tarball just fine, and it has an excellent first party Linux client.

I usually find that file-transfer, or a shared file server of my own choosing protected by an OpenVPN link (with unique certificates, o'course) is much better than these open-to-the-public servers. It is transparently obvious to me that these people are not being altruistic: they want to get ahold of your data.

Anytime I must put something on a public cloud-storage server, it is encrypted with my GPG key, and tagged for decryption by the public-key of the intended recipient. I can send it, my intended can receive it, and marketing departments learn nothing. (I don't care about "the guv'mint." If an official shows up at my door with a properly-executed search warrant, I'll hand over my keys in a little box tied with ribbons and bows. And demonstrate how to use them, if they ask.)

Not long ago, Apple sold "millions of dollars' worth" of personal data that they had collected to the Chinese. And, astonishingly, the news-stories only quibbled about the price ... not what they had actually done or the legitimacy of doing so.

I found Mega, 50MB free of charge for as long a time as you whish. Perhaps this article helps someone in my position to make a choice: https://www dot thebalance dot com/free-cloud-storage-1356638

There is no such thing as "the cloud", thats adword for someone else's computer.

For those recommending dropbox, make sure you encrypt that data, remember this:
https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/ed...rker-festival/
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2049...-requests.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder...acking_system/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...inian-targets/
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/dropbox...ews-17549.html

This probably applies to all of the cloud, especially so called free clouds. Imagine 15 years ago what your response would be if someone said: "Hey you can store your data on my computer for free, or another example, I will rent you space on my hard drive."

Plenty of choices. I use google and onedrive.

No problem per se with that, Jefro, but one must always be aware that you are willingly consigning your data to the custody of a third-party trustee, at a point in time where there really is (yet ...) no "well-conceived defining body of (international) law" to say what your property-rights (if any ...) actually are.

We are still pretending to rely upon (compulsory ...)"I Agree" dialog-boxes which contain so-called "exculpatory clauses" which might not mean a tinker's dam.

Therefore, and whether-or-not the vendor invitingly calls it "a drive," and says that it is "yours," the usual rules of caveat emptor apply as usual. You need not be paranoid, I think, but, "if the data is confidential, it's yours alone to protect." You should assume that, if you put your data there, it has become ... public. It has been ... disclosed.

It has become ...marketing information. It has become ore, waiting to be "data-mined."

I'm currently doing some voluntary work for a London charity. They have a database that needs input. Naturally I asked them where their database was, what computer it ran on, what software, who was responsible for looking after it, etc. They said it was "in the cloud". They have no idea where it actually is or how it works. Their only access is through a web page, which I assume runs on javascript.

It was set up for them by a young man from one of the London livery companies. Did you know that there is a livery company for information technologists? I didn't. They do projects like this for charities.

I am leery of "the cloud."

I certainly would not use simply as a spare hard drive for backup storage. If I need a spare hard drive, I'll buy one--they are cheap these days. I'm I'm concerned about fire or other disaster, I'll buy two and keep one in my safety deposit (lock) box at the bank and update it periodically.

The legitimate use I see for "the cloud" is collaboration. If you are working on project that requires exchanging files with someone far far away, DropBox or similar services can be very useful. So too can Google Docs, but I'd rank them a second or even third choice behind direct file exchange.

What ChuangTzu said. See my signature.

Having said that, I would agree that there are legitimate uses. But use encryption, as others have said. At work today, we had a very good meeting with some Filemaker database developers that we are considering using to bring our current system (Filemaker Pro 5.5, about 20 years old) into the 21st century. They made a very strong case for a cloud-based server, but also for running on our own server as well.

But for myself personally, for non-business purposes, no cloud, no thanks.

The only justification for storing stuff in the 'cloud' is if it NEEDS to be shared. If you store data there for security/backup, it is no longer private or secure and definitely not a reliable backup.

And it can get hacked too. Remember a few months ago there were those celebrities whose revealing selfies were stolen. It turned out that their iPhones uploaded everything to the cloud automatically every few hours.

There are no "pro's"
None.