How to deal with the Dropbox space drain

SINGAPORE — It's been two years of 'Great Space' from Dropbox. 

Come March, all that free extra space that was given in the Great Space Race campaign - up to 25GB - will revert to the original 6GB free. Well, unless of course, you pay a premium to keep the space.

A total of 20,532 students from National University of Singapore (NUS) and 14,983 from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) pooled forces to earn their school the title of 1st and 4th place on the global leaderboard of the Great Space Race campaign back in in 2012. Singapore Management University also landed relatively high up at 52nd place, rallying 5,942 sign-ups.

Dropbox’s Great Space Race campaign gifted college students with up to 25GB of free online storage for rallying their fellow school mates to join the site. Schools got more points for every new student who signed up. And as the points piled up, the school moved up the leaderboard and every participant got to enjoy another chunk of free space.

The two-year promise has come to an end, and today (Feb 3), a little more than two years later, Dropbox has sent a reminder that the extra space is expiring on March 4. All accounts will automatically return to its original 6GB limit.

Of course, users can upgrade their accounts before the space drain and get a 50 per cent discount off — but, the offer is only for the five-user package that costs US$375 (S$507) for the first year and US$750 for subsequent years. Otherwise, it's US$99 a year. 

But fret not. There are still free alternatives to 'great space'. 

For all that project work, stay on Google Drive

Pretty unequalled, Google Drive – Google docs and all that jazz – is best for getting your school mates in the loop of any project work while you are working on it. Besides simplifying correspondence, it also allows for you to park and share up to 15GB worth of documents for free. If anything more is needed, give in US1.99 (S$2.69) for 100GB.

For the fiercely-demanding camera backup, get on Microsoft's OneDrive

Recently, Microsoft’s OneDrive has ramped up the game to offer up to 15GB more free storage for those who enable its camera backup feature that allows for an auto sync of all the photos taken on your smartphone. That’s on top of 15GB worth of base storage it has started offering since July last year, a generous upgrade from its previous 7GB offering.

For sticky notes and texts for future reference, put them on Evernote

Best for annexing text, Evernote is another cloud-based service that allows for you to gather, store, collect and find your to-do lists, written thoughts and other miscellanies you’ve fumbled across in the net-o-sphere. With its filing system (called Notebook Stacks), it makes quite the perfect tool to put together a 20,000-word final year project. Storage goes by a monthly limit of 60MB – which is more than sufficient for text files. 

Pockets of spaces for everything else

Before Dropbox came to the fore, there was Box, which now offers 10GB of free storage. Apple's iCloud, Bitcasa and Amazon's Cloud Drive all grant a base of 5GB free storage space. If you can manage with Mandarin, Baidu offers a whopping 2TB (2000GB) free cloud storage.