I can only assume that it is that to blame for my usage having soared the past two months. I have a backup external drive and it offered a free storage in cloud so I set it up to store my photos, I far exceeded my allowance for two months running so have now uninstalled it in the hopes that it was the culprit.

I am really not a happy bunny, it added 50% to my telephone/internet bill.

Are you talking about the UK company The Cloud or the general concept used and offered by many ISPs termed cloud technology?


The Company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_(company)

The technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

The (company) article contains this entry in their history table as the final entry:
April 2012 Sky starts offering free wireless internet to Sky Broadband customers in the UK via The Cloud [4]

That was a year and a half ago. Maybe they've started to charge for it?

No I am talking about kooboodle.com which was provided with my Clickfree backup.

"Access files anywhere, anytime - backup all your files to the drive and then send your photos to kooboodle.com, Clickfree’s FREE online service. Kooboodle.com lets you store up to 50,000 photos that you can access anywhere, anytime from a computer or mobile device. Privately share, collect and exchange photos with family and friends to get the photos you’ve always wanted."

Sue, do you have a bandwidth restriction on your internet connection? Some ISPs include an allowance of X gigabytes within your monthly bill but after that they either 'throttle' your connection (i.e. reduce your download speed by a drastic amount) and/or they charge you for anything over the allowance, in mind-boggling amounts. So if you uploaded a large number of images, without any regard to their filesize, then the chances are you would have exceeded the standard bandwidth quotas. And if the images were those you used for your craft work they would probably have been huge.

My Cable TV charge went past the original 6 month deal and jumped from $30/mo to $55/mo for the same selection. (90% increase)
My phone landline bill (bare basic program) bill (20 yr customer) jumped from $24/mo to $35/mo. (about a 50% increase)
My ISP has held steady at $9.95/mo for ten yrs of unlimited (but slow dial-up) access.
My Social Security stipend has remained unchanged for 2 yrs. (0% increase)

The USA has the FCC, Federal Communications Commission, that is supposed to set rates unbiased. It seems they've changed to a bureaucracy that just sits in judgment of supplier requested increases. Instead of leading the pack, they are following the lobbyists' lead. Forget trying to get on their appointment list with a request to rein in rates if you are an individual taxpayer.

I did exceed my bandwidth Flopsy, as you say, my photos are large files so I used a heck of a lot, It didn't occur to me at the time that I uploaded, too late now. Here they charge for the extra rather than slowing us down. We can use unlimited overnight for free, it is daytime, 8am to midnight, which is limited. If I want to watch catch up TV on here I watch after midnight and that is free.

I will expect one more larger bill as it is already more than halfway through the billing period, then after that it ought to drop again to being the basic rate.

Well, I would suggest watching tv after midnight and uploading at the same time. Two bites of the freebies at the same time.

I got a free offer for cloud storage from my ISP... 500MB. I realise that for some people that may sound enough but that's about ten high res photos for me and I refuse to count how many of those I have. So I've stuck with an external portable hard drive that holds a terabyte of data. I might look into kooboodle for images I want to share though - Photobucket keeps messing about with its settings and gets less user-friendly every day. There are times when I'd just like to sit a bunch of techies down and slap them upside the head - if it ain't broke stop fixing the bloomin' thing!

I love Dropbox.com - it's very easy to use and you can easily share folders with other people.

Some processing of images to reduce file size is probably best before transferring them to the Cloud. Photos straight from the camera are most often over 3 megabytes in file size. Transferring a number of those to and from the Cloud on a regular basis would certainly be a factor in reaching any bandwidth usage limits. Other files aren't so bad, although PDFs can be fairly high depending on their content. Word documents are variable but normally a low number of kilobytes (KB).

I don't use Cloud storage because I have enough space on a second internal hard disk and an external USB drive. The few files I might need to transfer to other people is done via e-mail, or Skype if they have it. I can see that Cloud storage will be useful to some though.