iOS Device Backup — iTunes vs. iCloud

Now that Outlook.com is open to the public, Microsoft SkyDrive is too, and it comes with 7GB of free storage. I’m already using Apple iCloud (5GB), Dropbox (3.6GB) and Google Drive (5GB), and with the addition of SkyDrive, that makes over 20GB of cloud storage that is available to individual users free of charge… I am loving this.
SkyDrive has really beautiful web app versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and the overall interface is extremely nice. If this is what Office 365 looks like, I may have to give that a try too.
Google Drive still has more web applications (formerly Google Docs) and also has, importantly, optional two-factor authentication. I’ve been using the Google Authenticator mobile app for multi-factor authentication with LastPass, and you can easily add Google Drive and other platforms right in the same app.
iCloud already handles a lot of the storage needs for iOS devices natively, including iTunes music; and Dropbox is still the easiest and most intuitve for basic file storage, syncing and sharing.
I’m finally closing in on 5,000 songs in my iTunes Music Library… certainly not as many as some, but a cool milestone nonetheless. And I’m loving using iTunes Match and iCloud…
“How iTunes Match works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, chances are your music is already in iCloud. And for the few songs that aren’t, iTunes uploads what it can’t match (which is much faster than uploading your entire music library). Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.”
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— LastPass (@LastPass) August 8, 2012
Pro Tools® 9.0.5 on my laptop, Mbox 2®, recording at 24-bit / 48 kHz, then upload to iCloud, and with iTunes Match it’s delivered to all my devices. The best part is, iTunes 10.5 and iOS 5 devices actually support digital music playback at 24-bit / 48 kHz… so I get to listen back to better-than-CD quality for my efforts: