Yesterday evening I received a notification and an email from DropBox that my HTC 23gb free allowance was due to expire.

The fact that I thought this was a lifetime offer and not 2 years is another matter. The fact that had I known this, I would have created a new Dropbox account with a different email, signed in to my Note 4 with a brand new account and got 50gb free for 2 years. I could have done this with my Note 3 and Samsung S5 and Note Edge. But I didn’t as I thought I had enough space and keeping the same user name was less messy. But alas that was not to be.

So now it was time to throw all my toys out of the pram. It was time to abandon Dropbox forever. Except I couldn’t. Some of my critical apps needed to use Dropbox. So no matter what I decided to do next I could not give it the 2 fingers.

So after knocking back a bottle of whiskey to place me in a better frame of mind (joke) I decided to look at the options available. First option was to pay Dropbox for a Pro account. If you pay upfront for a year this costs £79 for 1 TB of storage. Google also charge the same amount for the same storage space. They also have a 100gb plan for $1.99 a month. About £15 a year and plenty space for me.

And then Donald (@crimsonsky76) emerged with the fact that Microsoft offer 1 TB storage for $99 (same price as the others) but this includes a family subscription to Office365. But that deal can be made better. You can buy a Windows 8.1 Tablet for £79 and get 1 TB data and Office365 included in the price. Add to the fact that OneDrive now have snazzy photo integration and its a superb deal. So with Microsoft I can get a free tablet if I wanted 1 TB data.

So what have I done. Well, as I mentioned I still need Dropbox, so I am in the process of moving files post 2013 to Google Drive including photos. Pre 2013 files can stay with Dropbox as this keeps me under my revised lower storage limit. I have 175gb of free storage with Google which will expire in 12 months approx. At that time, I will reconsider my options.

I omitted Apple Cloud in the above options. One because I don’t have an iPhone currently and secondly because we all know it is the most expensive and not as open as the others.

Flickr was another option banded around. You get 1 TB of free photo storage. I use Flickr but only to upload my favourite photos that I don’t mind sharing. I do not upload my private snaps. If Flickr allowed you to mass download your photos then I might have considered this as a solution.

So what would you have done?