Best cloud or online storage service for Mac (2024)

Price When Reviewed:Free (5GB), 99c (50GB), $2.99 (200GB), $9.99 (2TB) a month

View Apple iCloud here

As an Apple user, you’ll have heard of iCloud, but we don’t blame you if you find it confusing. It’s Apple’s own cloud-based storage system, and if you own an iPhone or iPad and have an Apple ID, you’ll have 5GB free storage.

It’s the easiest way for those bought into the Apple ecosystem (users of iPhone, iPad and Mac) to sync contacts, notes, files, photos and more across devices and access them on all their devices. For example, you can use the Files folder on an iPhone or iPad to view all your files stored in the cloud.

Because it integrates so seamlessly with all of Apple’s products and services, iCloud really is the best cloud storage solution for someone who is all-in with Apple. And I do mean all-in: All your computers are Macs, your mobile devices are iPhone or iPads, you work in Apple’s productivity software (Pages, Numbers, Notes), and so on.

Frustratingly, Apple only provides a paltry 5GB of free iCloud storage, which isn’t so bad if all you want to do is store some Pages and Numbers documents, but is grossly inadequate for photos and videos. Apple is years overdue for increasing this limit (Google offers 15GB free), but at the very least, it should stop counting iOS backups against it. Since the fall of 2021, Apple has offered to “loan” you as much iCloud storage space as you need to backup and restore your data onto a new device, for up to two weeks. It’s a good feature for those buying a new Apple device, but it won’t help you protect your data if your iPhone gets lost/stolen/damaged.

From there, it’s $0.99/£0.99 per month for 50GB, $2.99/£2.99 for 200GB, $9.99/£8.99 for 2TB, $29.99/£26.99 for 6TB and $59.99/£54.99 for 20GB. See: iCloud storage plans. You can enable family sharing on the 200GB and above plans—if you do, it doesn’t mean your family members can see all your cloud stuff. It just means your whole family’s iCloud usage will count against the same storage limit. These paid tiers are branded “iCloud+” and include several benefits. There’s iCloud Private Relay, free storage for HomeKit enabled security cameras, a Hide My Email feature, custom domain names for iCloud email accounts, and additional contact options for recovering your account. These are all excellent features that help solidify our view that iCloud is by far the best choice for those who are all-in on Apple devices.

The main benefit of paying for more iCloud storage is that nearly all of Apple’s apps can seamlessly sync through it. Photos, productivity apps, Mail, Calendar, and anything you drop into your iCloud Drive folder in Finder on a Mac are immediately available across all your Apple devices. A significant number of iOS apps optionally back up and sync through iCloud, too.

If you rely on non-Mac computers or non-iOS mobile devices from time to time, you’ll find iCloud’s limitations frustrating. Apple provides a full suite of web apps at iCloud.com, but they’re sort of mediocre. Apple provides an iCloud Windows app that syncs data and integrates your iCloud mail with common Windows apps like Outlook, but there are no native productivity apps for Windows or Android: If you want to edit a Pages document, you have to use the web interface.

We like using iCloud, but we also pay for it. Most decent cloud services require you to pay a small fee.

If you’re a heavy Apple user, you might consider theApple One service bundle. It’s much more than a cloud storage solution, and thus beyond the scope of this article, but the value offered may tip the scales in iCloud’s favor for you.

Price When Reviewed:From $49.99 a year 1 Mac, no cloud storage; Advanced: $57.99 a year, 1 Mac 50GB cloud storage; Premium: $124.99 a year, 1 Mac, 1TB cloud storage

View Acronis here.

Acronis is a name well known in the Windows world, but less so to Mac users.

Cyber Protect Home Office (once known as Acronis True Image) is its personal backup solution. It supports backing up your data to a local disk, Acronis’ own cloud-based service, or a network-attached storage device. The latter makes it good option for anyone with a NAS that doesn’t support Apple’s Time Machine.

You’ll need to set up an account with Acronis to use it, but you can give Cyber Protect Home Office a spin without signing up for its paid-for service or even providing payment details, by using the free trial to back up to a local drive or network disk.

The main reason for the name change from True Image, which was chosen to show that the backup tool creates a ‘true image’ of the disk it’s backing up, is that it now goes beyond just backing up your disk. If backing up files is one part of the data protection equation, then the other is protecting those files, wherever they reside, from cyber-attack, and that’s what Cyber Protect Home Office is designed to do. It will scan existing data for malware, monitor files you interact with online, detect ransomware and cryptojacking attacks, and perform assessments of the vulnerability of your data to being compromised.

In addition to the security features, Cyber Protect Home Office now allows you to backup Office 365 files to Acronis Cloud, clone your startup disk (either a bootable clone or a compressed image), and synchronise files locally or with cloud storage. It also allows you to create what it calls a Survival Kit – a bootable disk with all your system, or a partition, and file backup.

Cyber Protect Home Office is very straightforward to use. Its interface is about as straightforward and friendly as they come. The first time you open it, your Mac is selected as the source. Click the Destination button to choose whether to back up to Acronis Cloud, a local drive or a NAS box.

If you don’t want to create an image of your entire Mac, click on the source box to choose files and folders to back up. From here, you can also back up external disks, a mobile device to your Mac, or your social media accounts to Acronis Cloud.

Click on the settings icon and you can schedule regular backups, exclude files, encrypt backups or delete old backups.

Pricing starts at $49.99/£42.99 per year per computer, but that doesn’t include cloud storage. If you want to use Acronis Cloud, you’ll pay a yearly subscription ranging from for Advanced cover at $57.99/£62.99 for one computer and just 50 GB of cloud storage to $124.99/£106.99 for Premium cover for one computer with 1TB storage. Additional storage costs around £30/$30/year/TB.

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office combines the best of local and online backup tools and offers lots of other features, such as protection from malware and other online threats. It’s not cheap, and the removal of the one-off payment option makes it more expensive to get started. However, it’s comprehensive, easy to use and well-worth considering.

Price When Reviewed:$7 per month or $70 per year

View Backblaze here.

Backblaze is an online service that allows you to back up your Mac to its servers automatically or according to a schedule you set.

Once you create an account and select your plan (there’s a 30-day free trial, too), you download the Mac app and get started. Backblaze is focused on simplicity, so it automatically chooses what to back up. That includes the contents of your Documents, Pictures, Movies and Music folders, but excludes your Applications folder. Backblaze also excludes some file types from being backed up, including .dmg disk images – that restriction can be switched off, however.

Backups are kept for 30 days, so you can restore from any that ran during that time. And, as you would expect, backups are incremental so only files that have changed since it last ran are copied. Data is encrypted and you can optionally add a six-digit passcode to provide an additional layer of security.

When it comes to restoring your data, you have three options: you can restore via Backblaze’s web interface or you can have files sent to you on a USB stick or hard drive for an additional fee. And there’s a 100% refund if you return the USB stick or hard drive within 30 days, though you’ll have to pay shipping and taxes.

You can view individual files and choose which ones to download. And you can view and share backed up files on an iPhone or iPad with the Backblaze mobile app.

The Locate your Computer service tracks your Mac’s location to help you find it if it’s stolen and, if it’s still running backups, tell you its current IP address and show you recently backed-up data.

Backblaze’s user interface comprises a menu bar item and a System Preferences pane. However, that pane is more like a fully fledged application, with options to exclude files, add folders and disks to the backup, and throttle bandwidth. It’s simple and very Mac-like.

If you only need to back up one Mac, and particularly if you want to back up external disks, Backblaze’s simplicity and price give it the edge over Carbonite and IDrive.

With Backblaze you can back up your Mac for $7 (approx £5) a month or $70/year (approx £53), data is stored in secure data centres and two-factor authentication adds an extra level of security.

Price When Reviewed:Free (5GB), $1.99 (100GB), $6.99 (1TB) a month

View Microsoft OneDrive here

Microsoft OneDrive? For Apple users? Yeah! You’d be surprised how well Microsoft’s products work with iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

OneDrive gives you 5GB for free, the same ridiculously small storage space as iCloud. There’s a $1.99/£1.99 per month subscription that nets you 100GB of storage, which is just okay. For $6.99/£5.99 a month you can get 1TB of storage and office apps like Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. Where OneDrive really shines is in its $9.99/£7.99 per month (or $99.99/£79.99 per year) level. This gives you 1TB of cloud storagefor up to six users. That’s 1TB per user, not 6TB shared! Each user also gets Office 365, with full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote, and you can install them on up to five computers, five tablets, and five smartphones.

It’s a good deal if you’ve got a family full of people with different devices. OneDrive, and all those Office apps, work on Windows (of course), Mac, iOS, and Android. Most importantly, Office apps are actually quite good on iOS and Mac. OneDrive syncs neatly across devices and works well on the Mac, integrating seamlessly into Finder. The iOS apps support iPad multitasking, and you even get Apple Watch apps for OneNote and Outlook.

Microsoft’s web-based apps are quite robust, too. So if you need to make some quick edits from a computer without Word or Excel installed, or just want to use a web-based email portal, you won’t get a half-baked experience.

If there’s a weak spot with OneDrive, it’s photos and videos. Yes, the OneDrive iOS app can automatically back up photos and videos from your iPhone or iPad (and OneNote has an awesome document scanner built-in), but the photo album experience online is lackluster and there’s no dedicated photo browser/editor app.

We still think Google provides a better overall cloud solution for most users, especially since you get three times as much free storage and double the storage at the $1.99/month level. But if you frequently use Microsoft’s productivity software, and especially if you have an iPhone or iPad but use a Windows 10 PC, you should give OneDrive a closer look.

Microsoft’s OneDrive comes as part of a Microsoft Office plan, be it one-off install or Office 365 subscription. The base yearly Office 365 pricing included a huge 1TB of OneDrive storage and is great if you’re fully bought into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

It should be the number one choice for Office users, especially users of Mobile Office. But for those not using Office, as there may not be enough features to be attractive and Google Drive does a much better job of working well with different file types.

Price When Reviewed:Free (15GB), $1.99 (100GB), $2.99 (200GB), $9.99 (2TB) a month

View Google Drive here

Google re-branded its cloud storage offering as Google Onein an effort to clarify that the space is shared between Photos, Docs, Gmail, and any other Google consumer services. The old name, Google Drive, now only refers to theGoogle Drive app, which is used for managing your online files.

A free Google One account gets you 15GB of space, a reasonable amount. You can boost that to 100GB for $1.99/£1.59 a month or $19.99/£15.99 per year. Doubling that to 200GB is $2.99/£2.49 per month or $29.99/£24.99 per year, and a hefty 2TB is $9.99/£7.99 a month or $99.99/£79.99 per year. That’s generally on par with other top-tier cloud services. Google also offers even bigger 10TB, 20TB, and 30TB plans.

Google’s cloud service simply does a lot of things very well. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides have earned a great reputation as reliable, fast, and easy-to-use web-based collaborative productivity solutions and the iOS apps even support split-screen multitasking on iPad. Google Drive provides access to all your stuff via the web, and the app integrates very well with the iOS share menu.

The Google Photos app is better than Apple’s in a lot of ways, especially the experience of accessing your photos on the web. It’s a great place to back up your photos and videos, if that’s all you use it for. But Google recently added new features to make it more compelling to sign up for a paid plan, with the Magic Eraser being the highlight. This feature allows you to easily edit out unwanted people or objects from a photo–all you have to do is circle the item you want to erase or accept the erase suggestion that’s made for you, select Erase All, and items are removed and the spaces are smartly filled in. Other features include Portrait Light, Portrait Blur, and free shipping on print orders.

Google also offers VPN by Google One, a VPN for Android and iOS that is coming to Mac and Windows. On March 8, Google announced that the VPN service will soon be available with any of the paid plans. Previously, you had to sign up for the 2TB plan. Google is also adding its dark web reporting feature to all paid plans. This scans the dark web for your personal info and notifies you if anything is found, as well as suggests what actions you can take to rectify the situation. The VPN and dark web report rollout will happen over the next several weeks.

For your Mac or Windows PC, Backup and Syncis fantastic. It integrates your Google Drive into Finder or Explorer, keeps it in sync across devices, and can even back up your Documents, Desktop, Pictures (including your Photos library), or other folders of your choosing.

It may feel strange to choose Google as your primary cloud storage solution when you use Apple products, but it really does work well. It’s a no-brainer if you regularly use a Windows PC or want to access your files from the web, and the price is reasonable.

Google Drive has grown into a very mature file-saving and sharing platform, and is our recommendation if you don’t want to use iCloud for whatever reason. Free app downloads for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android lets you log in and stayed logged in to all of your devices.

Price When Reviewed:Free (10GB), $4.99 (500GB), $9.99 (2TB) a month

View pCloud here

pCloud might not be as familiar a name as some of the others on this list, but trust us, it’s one you should definitely learn.

The service handles all kinds of files with ease and uses 256-bit AES encryption to ensure that they remain safe while online. The basic tier comes with 10GB of free storage, albeit with the need to unlock 3GB of this via a few tasks, such as informing friend about the joys of pCloud. To be honest, this is not much of a drag, as your friends will probably thank you in the long run.

There are no pesky file size restrictions, and 30-day versioning is standard, so if you accidentally delete a file you’ll be able to recover it even after a few weeks.

If 10GB isn’t enough then you can move to 500GB for $4.99/£4.99 p/m ($49.99/£49.99 a year right now) or there’s 2TB available for $9.99/£9.99 ($99.99/£99.99 a year right now).

Like pretty much all the services in this roundup, there’s a free trial available that lets you see if the service fits your needs. We recommend you give each one a spin, and if you don’t mind a bit of file juggling then you might find that using the combined free tiers of all of them gives you enough storage for all your data needs.

Price When Reviewed:Free (10GB, limited to 250MB files), $4.50 (100GB, limited to 2GB files), $12 (100GB) a month

View Box here

Box is primarily focused on its paid-for business accounts, which provide a wide range of additional features for larger organisations. There are a variety of different options available, including version-tracking controls, and tools for online collaboration and project management.

Sharing is obviously important for business users, and Box gives you great control by allowing you to specify preview, editing and downloading permissions for all your files.

There are also Individual and Teams plans. You get 10GB of free storage with the basic account, but this is limited to 250MB per file. There’s a 100GB option for $4.50/£5.50, but this is limited to 2GB files. If you need to share larger (5GB) files the $12/£11 a month option would be best, but this is still limited to 100GB storage. If you want the unlimited storage options you need to consider the Business Plans.

For solo file storage it’s not the best option, but businesses will appreciate the focus on security and unlimited storage options.

That being said, it’s useful if you want another option for storing documents, photos, and a few music files.

Price When Reviewed:Free (2GB), $9.99 (2TB), $16.99 (2TB each for 6 family members) a month

View Dropbox here

No discussion of cloud storage solutions would be complete without discussing the company that popularized consumer cloud syncing: Dropbox. Unfortunately, it’s hard to recommend for most users. A free DropBox Basic account nets you a paltry 2GB, and it doesn’t include some of the service’s niftier features like Smart Sync. The cheapest plan it offers is $9.99/£7.99 per month for 2TB (still missing a few features) or $16.99/£13.99 per month for a family plan with a shared 2TB for up to six users and all the service’s features. Dropbox does a great job of syncing folders on computers and mobile devices, but that’s just not enough anymore—its competitors do a great job of that, too. Creating and editing documents is done through Dropbox’s all-in-one Paper app, which is just okay.

Dropbox will back up your photos and videos if you want, but the photo management experience is lackluster. While Dropbox was the go-to cloud storage and sync service ten years ago, it has since been surpassed by more robust, flexible, and affordable offerings from its competitors.

The free version is great for consumers, but only offers 2GB free compared to iCloud’s 5GB, so it might only be worth it if you really need the extra storage. If you need more than that this is one of the most expensive options, especially considering it doesn’t offer extended versioning facilities or share permissions.

One useful feature is a little pull-down menu in your Mac’s main toolbar, which allows you to monitor your files as they are uploaded, and you can also set Dropbox to automatically upload photos from your iPhone or iPad, or even to upload your entire iPhoto library for safekeeping.

Price When Reviewed:$59.62

View IDrive here.

lDrive is another online backup service. However, it differs from both Backblaze and Carbonite in a number of ways.

Firstly, it has a free tier – you can back up 5GB without paying anything. After that, though, it’s more expensive than either of its competitors featured here.

Currently, the annual charge for the Personal tier is $59.62 (approx £46) for the first year and $79.50/year (approx £61) after that, but that only allows you to backup 5TB of data, while Backblaze and Carbonite allow unlimited data. However, that 5TB can be spread across multiple computers, whereas Backblaze and Carbonite limit you to one computer.

Also, if you prefer to restore by having data physically shipped to you, lDrive provides that for free for the first restore each year – though if you’re outside the US you’ll have to pay for the shipping.

Like Backblaze, lDrive also allows you to back up external hard drives. Even with external drives backing up, it’s unlikely most people will breach the 5TB limit – bearing in mind that you’re not backing up applications or system files.

Features like Rewind and Snapshots allow you to restore from earlier versions of files or snapshots of the complete data set. And all data is encrypted, with the option to set your own private encryption key.

lDrive’s user interface makes using it very straightforward. Your Desktop, Documents, Music and Pictures folders are automatically selected for backup, along with the contents of ~/Library/Mail.

To add other folders, click ‘Change’ at the bottom of the window – that’s not exactly intuitive. You can add videos to the backup, but locating them in lDrive’s interface takes a great deal of doing.

Both scheduling and restoring are straightforward, however. As is choosing a local drive as the destination for a backup in place of lDrive’s servers.

lDrive’s free tier and the ability to spread your data allocation in the paid tiers across multiple computers makes it attractive. Overall, though, it’s expensive for a single machine.

Price When Reviewed:$71.99 per year (Basic)

View Carbonite here.

Carbonite is very similar to Backblaze in that it allows you to back up your Mac to remote servers and recover files when you need to. Like Backblaze, you sign up for an account and download a Mac application, and it automatically selects files to download.

Also like Backblaze, Carbonite doesn’t back up applications or system files. One key difference is that Carbonite’s basic plan doesn’t automatically back up the contents of your Movies folder either – although you can select videos manually to be backed up. Neither does Carbonite back up the contents of external drives.

Files are protected with 128-bit encryption, but there’s no option to add your own password.

Restoring data is done online, using the Carbonite application – the option to ship media containing your data is only available within the US. And you can restore from any backup run within the last 30 days, allowing you to roll back to earlier versions of files.

The Carbonite mobile app allows you to view and download files to an iPhone or iPad.

Carbonite is very simple to use. In fact, it almost feels too simple. Download the app, install it and launch it, and Carbonite starts backing up your Documents and Pictures folders straight away.

In the left-hand sidebar, there’s a list of volumes and the main user folders (Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Movies and Music). By clicking on those you can select files to be backed up or excluded.

Restoring files is just as easy. If you want to restore a complete backup, click the Restore option in the sidebar and choose whether to download files to a folder or put them back where they were originally.

To restore individual files and folders, navigate to them using the folders in the sidebar and choose the download option.

Carbonite, at the time of writing starts at $71.99 (approx £55) per year for a single computer. If you want to back up external drives and back up videos automatically, that jumps to $111.99 (approx £86). That makes it expensive compared to its nearest competitors.