How much cloud storage do I need?
Check your current usage and double it. Typical reference points: documents only, 100 GB is plenty; an average phone photo library, 200 GB to 1 TB; a household with years of photos and videos, 2 TB; hobbyist photographers and video shooters, 5 TB and up. The 2 TB tier is the market’s sweet spot and what most families should buy.
Measure before you buy: phones show their usage under settings (Photos is almost always the bulk), Windows under Storage settings, Macs under About This Mac. Most people discover their entire digital life currently weighs 300 GB to 1.5 TB, dominated by camera output. Documents are rounding errors: a lifetime of spreadsheets fits in single gigabytes; one minute of 4K phone video eats 400 MB.
Why double it: photo libraries compound. Phone cameras produce larger files every generation, video share keeps rising, and storage anxiety (the quiet pressure to delete memories to fit a plan) is exactly what you are paying to abolish. Doubling current usage typically buys three to five years of headroom, which conveniently matches the break-even horizon of lifetime plans like pCloud’s, making the 2 TB lifetime a rational family purchase.
The market’s pricing tiers do the rest of the deciding for you. 100 GB costs around $2 a month everywhere (fine for documents and a modest photo roll). The 2 TB tier clusters at $9.99 across Google One, iCloud+, Dropbox, and friends, with independents like Sync.com and pCloud cheaper per terabyte or pay-once. Above 2 TB, IDrive’s 5 TB backup plan (under $100 a year) is the value anomaly worth knowing about. One non-obvious tip: storage shared across a family plan (Google One, iCloud+) counts everyone’s phones; budget for the household’s biggest photographer, not the average.