Help - do I need a cloud?

[VenetiaLanyon]

I am stuck in the world of physical music , so would someone be very kind and explain to me what I need to get out?

• I have a bunch of old CDs that I'd like to store on a cloud
• I'd like to be able to download music purchases to a cloud, but don't have any downloads at the moment
• I don't have any Apple gear, but have a blackberry and a laptop.
• Would be happy to buy an I-Touch or something if needs be
• Don't want to just store stuff on a hard drive.

What do I need? Apple? Amazon? Another cloud? Very happy to pay for storage, but need to drag myself wimpering into this century...

Thanks

"I'd like to be able to download music purchases to a cloud, but don't have any downloads at the moment"

Any music you purchase through iTunes will now be available through Apple's iCloud service. It won't take up any of the space you're allowed and is currently free.

However...

Why do you want to do this? What do you think you'll gain?

Both Apple and Amazon offer 5GB of space for free, and that's not a lot of music. I've got an iPod that's many times the size of that and is nearly full. So to store that much music in the Cloud I'd have to pay for the space.

And what do you get if you pay for the space?

Well true enough it is all backed up for you and "safe", however you really won't want to be accessing it on the move (slow and expensive data connections) and will probably upload and download it most when you're at home. And if you're at home why not use a disk drive in your house?

For the price that you'll be paying yearly to a cloud storage provider you could buy a new portable disk drive yearly and use them for backups.

I'm sure that in the end we all will be using the Cloud for storage, but we're not there yet. Moving everything into the Cloud isn't "this century" quite yet.

Thanks for your reply, BadgersPaws.

Not sure that you've convinced me, though. The whole "backed up and safe" thing really appeals to me, and want to be able to just load all our music onto one space so that it doesn't matter if we change devices / drop coffee on the disk drive etc. Would also be good to have access to it in the office.

OK well here's some information on Amazon's Cloud Drive:
www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore

I don't think that iCloud will cut it as you can't just store your own files on it.