pCloud

2 years ago, the ruthless killing of the (then) best free cloud filesync app Copy was announced.

During the scramble to find a replacement for my beloved Copy, with whom I interacted on a seemingly unhealthy basis, I tried dozens of similar services. Spreadsheets were made. Long forgotten Posts may prevail on here somewhere.

Box is one I’d already used but gave up on – there was a file size limit of 250MB or something dumb. No ISOs, which is the majority of my free pCloud storage right now.

pCloud is the one new-to-me service into whom I placed a non-trivial amount of my eggs.

Overall it’s been great. Through various promotions the likes of “refugiados de Copy” and people using my Special Link to get their own free cloudness, I now have 55GB of free cloud storage in my pCloud, which the software will mount as the P: drive in Windows. That feature was annoying at first because I used to always set my PortableApps USB drive to P: on computers where it was used, but alas, no more.

Upload/download speeds could be better. The web-based “remote upload” feature is quite useful. Useful enough that I’ve requested it be added to the desktop application several times, along with some additional features that’d make it more robust (e.g. remote upload a whole FTP folder to your pCloud via URL).

pCloud now offers some Lifetime storage: https://www.pcloud.com/lifetime/

Though only 500GB and 2TB variants, and if you bought the 500GB and end up needing more space you’d still have to pay full price for the 2TB, and none of the storage amounts “stack”, so you wouldn’t even end up with 2.5TB in the end. And I haven’t seen if you can add additional 2TB chunks later on. Crypto has its own additional Lifetime account price.

I’ve been thinking of pairing a Lifetime 2TB (not enough for ALL THE THINGS but I could probably kill my Dropbox and OneDrive accounts) and Lifetime Crypto, but you can’t Crypto a sync’d folder so my lifelong dream of having my Home folder encrypted and sync’d across the universe would never be realized.

The final thing preventing me from trading currency for one of their Lifetime accounts is the several times in the past where I’ve been burned by supposed “Lifetime” accounts elsewhere. Here are a couple gems:

Slysoft AnyDVD: this went like “euh, The Pressure™, we gotta shut down!” Then [essentially] the next day resurfaced with a new company name complete with a slightly modified logo, selling the same product under the same name, telling Lifetime license holders of more than 7 minutes to Eff Off.

PasswordBox: For a while there I was constantly annoyed by being annoyed by LastPass’s recurring annoyances and their sloth-like speed of fixing them. So I grabbed a [albeit cheap] “lifetime” license for PasswordBox. They sold it to Intel, Intel re-branded it, Lifetime license holders were given a trial of the “new product” TrueKey, after which they were allowed to [quietly, and I’m paraphrasing here] go inject fluid into shale beds at high pressure themselves.

On the other hand, there are a few Lifetime passes, etc. I still hold which have not yet imploded on me, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

In conclusion, I’d want the current Lifetime cost to include Crypto, be able to stack additional Lifetime storage amounts, and some sort of (full refund or better) guarantee if their lifetime doesn’t exceed my own.