The iCloud storage plans are:
- 5GB — Free
- 10GB — $20/year
- 20GB — $40/year
- 50GB — $100/year
Applications must be specifically written to directly access iCloud data as if it were physically connected to the Mac, iPhone, iPad, or iPod. Apple's requirements for allowing apps to access iCloud are pretty stringent and require lots of security precautions such as "sandboxing" app data on the Mac or iDevice. That effectively limits iCloud compatible apps to distribution through the App Store channels. The restrictions are intended to increase data reliability and security. At the present time all the Apple apps and a pretty limited number of third party apps are iCloud compatible.
Dropbox starts out with 2GB of free data storage and that can be increased up to 18GB at the rate of 500MB per referral. For a fee, Dropbox Pro provides…
- 100GB — $99/year
- 200GB — $199
- 500GB — $499
Dropbox does not have the application restrictions of iCloud, but arguably the price of that is a decrease in security and reliability. All you have to do with Dropbox is place the files and/or folders in a designated Dropbox folder on your system. The penalty for that is opening a data file in Dropbox can be slow — in my experience slower than iCloud.
An additional benefit of online data storage, at least in iCloud and Dropbox is the ability to publicly or selectively share some of your data on the web. Thus eliminating the need for third party services to transfer large amounts of data on the web. Dropbox in particular offers facilities for team collaboration — at a price.
I use both iCloud and Dropbox because I have some applications that are not iCloud compliant/compatible most notably the accounting system I use. If I had my "druthers", I would druther have everything on iCloud because it is unnoticeably transparent in implementation. The developers of my accounting system tell me they are working on getting Apple's approval for using iCloud and I am cheering them on.
