Oh no, free Stack will be closed

So this is not related to Astiga directly, rather for how I use it (and for how I know it was in the beginning build for).

The 1 TB free accounts will be stopped. That's a big shame as that was how I had all my music synced.

Are there more people hit by this, and are there any good solutions combined with Astiga?

Comments

  • KoenKoen Member, Former

    You are not the only one.

    I also have 1TB as part of the Office 365 family plan, so I'm switching to that. What is a good solution for you of course depends on what you want/need. Pricewise I have not seen anything close to a free 1TB anywhere. pCloud is rather affordable if you go for the long term solution (5+ years). OneDrive is about the same price as Stack is (at the non-discounted price), Dropbox and Google Drive are a tad more expensive. Most of them fall within this €5 - €10 per month price range.

  • AgistaAgista Member
    edited November 2020

    Like Koen said, the only route might be to pay for a cloud service.

    The most generous free service is Mega. It used to offer 50GB free. I think these days you have to jump through some hoops to get the full 50GB. From some comments here, I think Mega doesn't play nice with Astiga though.

    If you have other people who can pitch in, Office 365 family can be affordable. Depending on where you live, the price might be different. Where I am now, a year is about $75. You get 1TB of OneDrive storage (besides Office 365 and 1 hour of Skype each month) for 6 accounts. In the US, there are usually good deals at Best Buy, NewEgg, etc, particularly during Black Friday. You can get a family plan for $40-70.

    Another option is pCloud. It has more features than any other cloud service I have used. It also has a great mobile app. They have lifetime plans. You can either get a 500GB plan or a 2TB plan. While the 2TB plan goes for $350, I got mine during last year's Black Friday for $245. I should note that in the past few months, pCloud's speed has been exceptionally bad for me. I don't know if it's a widespread issue or not.

    Probably the least expensive option is Koofr. They also offer lifetime accounts for their 100GB, 250GB, and 1TB plans, they go for $30, $60, and $170, respectively. But since they offer them on StackSocial, there are always (40% off) discount codes on StackSocial. I got the 1TB plan for $102.

    Koofr doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Dropbox and pCloud, but it's a competent service with good speeds, a nice minimalistic clean interface and a good mobile app. It has all the basic features you'd need in a cloud service. It works well with Astiga through WebDAV. The concern is whether it will be around for a long time or not. It's a concern will all the smaller consumer cloud services, particularly those that offer lifetime accounts. But even if it stays in business for a couple of years, you will get your money's worth out of it. Hopefully they will thrive and remain in business.

    Most of the rest of the cloud services go for around $10/month, give or take a few bucks.

  • KoenKoen Member, Former

    @Agista the free Stack offer was, as far as I know, exclusive to the Netherlands (or the Benelux). We do not tend to have those extreme Black Friday discounts.

    Icedrive currently goes for €139 for 1TB lifetime, or €49,99 yearly, but does limit your monthly bandwidth to 2TB. It also depends on how much you value the ability to switch.

  • pCloud also has a monthly 2TB bandwidth limit.

    Icedrive's price is actually pretty good for a zero-knowledge encryption cloud storage. Again, the problem might be with longevity of the service.

    As for Black Friday deals, you are right. It's a US thing although it seems that some larger retailers in Europe are having large scale discounts on that day. I know that Amazon UK has had Office 365 Family for around £40-50 on several occasions. Is it possible to purchase from Amazon UK from a Euro area country?

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