Raise your hand if you love free stuff! Okay, you can put them down now.

BoxIn my last post I raved about Dropbox, and it continues to be a workhorse for me. But I have a paid plan which provides me with 135 gigabytes of storage for $100/year which I consider money well spent.

For folks with more modest needs, however,  it might be overkill. That said, a free Dropbox account only provides two gigabytes of storage which may be enough for someone saving a few spreadsheets or documents but for digital photos and music, it doesn’t take long to blow right through that. So where to turn for something that’s still free but offers adequate storage? The answer, at least for now, is Dropbox competitor, Box.

Box is currently offering new subscribers 50 gigabytes of free cloud storage for life with no strings attached as far as I can tell. That’s 25 times the amount of free storage Dropbox offers and 10 times the amount that Google offers with Google Drive. As you’ll see from the sign up page, this offer is courtesy of the folks at Dell but is apparently open to any all comers.

The only limits I can find are that individual files can be no larger than 250 megabytes and as I mentioned in an earlier post, there is no version control. But did I mention it’s free?

What is included:

  • Desktop sync (files are local but automatically synced to the cloud where they’re safely backed up and available to you on just about any device)
  • Apps for iOS, Android, Windows 8, and Blackberry 10
  • File sharing

50 gigabytes is a lot of music and a lot of photos. Even I rarely hit 250 megabytes for a single file so I suspect most people will have no problem with that limitation. Besides, did I mention it’s free?

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up now and don’t forget to tell your friends. There is no excuse for losing your files to harddrive crash, anymore.