We looked at iPad cloud storage options and selected the five best providers based on ease of use, integration, cost, sharing options, and more. Take a look and see what’s best for your needs. iCloud Drive is an excellent all-purpose storage solution for the iPad. Although it shines in an iOS-centric world, it is somewhat limiting for users who share the workload between computers, tablets, and smartphones. It doesn’t offer the same document editing, in-document searching, and other extras offered by the competition. One area where iCloud rules the roost is refresh speed. It’s lightning-quick to get a file you just popped into your iCloud Drive folder on your computer to show up on your iPad. iCloud Photos is the easiest way to keep cloud backups of your photos if you use the iPad and the iPhone. A free iCloud account comes with 5 GB of storage space, but some people with large photo and video libraries may want to bump up to the a larger plan, which comes with a monthly fee. While your cloud storage choice is ultimately about your needs, the Dropbox advantage is how well it works with all platforms. Do you use Microsoft Office? No problem. More of an Apple apps person? Not an issue. Dropbox falls on the more expensive side. It offers 2 GB of free space and has a 2 TB one-user Plus plan for $9.99 per month and a 2 TB Family Plan (up to six users) for $16.99 per month. But the cost is worth it if you need the flexibility to work with any platform. Setting up Dropbox on an iPad is easy and offers many advantages. Dropbox is one of the few cloud storage options that allow you to boot into Adobe Acrobat to edit PDF files on your iPad. For light editing, such as adding text or a signature, you don’t need to load Acrobat. Dropbox even comes with a document scanner, although if you have extensive needs in the scanning department, you should go with a dedicated app. Dropbox has robust search capabilities and supports saving files offsite and sharing them across the web. Edit text files on Box right in the iPad app, which is awesome. However, it doesn’t allow PDF editing and isn’t quite as ubiquitous in working with other apps like Dropbox. One nice bonus of Box is the 10 GB of free storage, which is among the highest of any cloud storage service. Although the free storage plan limits the file upload size to 250 MB, it’s attractive for moving photos off of the iPad. The premium plan ups the file size upload limit to 5 GB and the overall storage to 100 GB for $10 a month. Similar to Dropbox and a few other cloud services, you can set OneDrive to back up your photos and videos automatically. It’s fast when loading previews for all files except Microsoft files. For a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, OneDrive launches the Word or Excel app. This is great for times when you intend to edit the document, but for viewing documents, it makes the process much more awkward. The best deal on OneDrive is the Microsoft 365 Personal plan that gives 1 TB of storage and access to the full suite of Microsoft 365 apps. Google Drive offers the ability to back up your photos automatically, and it’s fairly quick when previewing documents. The search capabilities are lacking, and other than editing Google documents in Google’s apps, it’s a bit light in the content-creation department. Google Drive comes with 15 GB of free storage, but this is somewhat offset by Gmail eating into that storage, something you’ll experience if you tend to save emails indefinitely. Your 15 GB free allotment also includes all your Google Photos, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, and Jamboard files. If you find you need more storage, Google Drive offers a bargain with its Google One storage plan that comes with 100 GB for $1.99 a month or 200 GB for $2.99 per month. The price jumps to $9.99 a month for 2 TB, but if you only need 100 GB, the $2 deal is attractive. Cloud storage is even a more secure option than buying an external hard drive for your iPad. Cloud storage works by syncing your files to your devices. For a computer, that means downloading a piece of software that sets up a folder on your hard drive. This folder acts like any other folder on your computer except for one difference; the files are regularly scanned and uploaded to the cloud server, and new or updated files are downloaded to the folder on your computer. For the iPad, this function happens with a cloud service app on your device. You’ll have access to the files you save on your computer or smartphone and can easily save new photos and documents from your iPad to your cloud storage.
