I use Dropbox for basic everyday cloud storage, but I don't need much for that so I'm good with the free account. I use Crashplan for cloud backup, it costs me less than $3 a month for unliminted storage and does a good job backing up all my important files (got a couple hundred gigs backed up there). I used to use Mozy, but they changed their pricing model and removed the unliminted option so I switched to Crashplan and have been pretty happy with it for the past couple of years since I switched.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

What would be the main advantage over something like Dropbox? I've coincidentally been looking at personal cloud storage after the failure of an external backup drive. The main thing for me is I want to make sure it's a system that will be around in 10, dare I say 20 years? Tough these days with the rapid change in tech.

Copy is a service of Barracuda Networks who's been around for a decade now and has their fingers in lots of areas of technology, so they're a company I'd feel is more likely than some random cloud storage start-up to still exist a decade from now.

There a couple of benefits with Copy over Dropbox, which btw I love otherwise, but the primary reason I had to find an alternative was price. Dropbox charges $19.99/month for 200GB, whereas Copy charges $9.99/month for 250GB (and $19.99/month for 500GB).

A couple of other benefits are Copy offers 15GB with a free account and includes undelete and version restoration, whereas Dropbox offers 2GB free and you have to upgrade for the "Pack Rat" (aka. undelete) feature.

One other benefit, which is an unscientific comparison and may be totally subjective, is upload speed. While my upload speed to Copy is always 200kb/s, in my experience with Dropbox, it always seems to vary from as slow as 20kb/s up to 170kb/s. (This is most important when doing a mass upload of hundreds of gigs, which, as you may guess, is not often.)

Is a run-of-the-mill root server not an option?

At least over here, a decent root server² costs considerably less³ than any cloud service and it allows you to run an encrypted Debian squeeze as well as truecrypt containers for the bulk of the data.

²: 50€ a month, 6TB of storage, 10TB of traffic @ 100MBit/s, unlimited @ 10MBit/s
³: shared with three friends, 12.50€ for 1.5TB

I've been trying to use Drive for a daily journal but lately I've not bothered. I think the problem is that the mobile app is not great to use (nor even the desktop version) with the main problem being that you're using a watered-down Office productivity service.
Searching is really clunky and when I need to retrieve something I realise it's going to be a slog.

I used your link for Copy and am just going to try it out. If it's just a Dropbox alternative I may not be that interested. But effective, rich document management would be useful.

I also use www.papyrs.com for my "intranet" needs but hard to get my mates on there but with Drive everyone I know has a google account and sharing docs is very easy. In fact Drive seems to work best for working with other people but isn't so great for the individual user.

I don't trust companies' clouds. I would do my own! VS should be on the cloud too.

FYI, a funny Dilbert comic strip: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-07-05/ ...