Cloud storage continues its fight for greater relevance in users' lives. The limited upload speeds seen in available connections affect its adoption, but developers have tried to compensate with more space. On the other side of the planet, the Weiyun system from Chinese corporation Tencent decided to raise the stakes and offer new users a minimum of one terabyte at no cost but the question is: Is it worth it?
According to Microsoft OneDrive, my total available cloud space amounts to a respectable 125 gigabytes. Google Drive is a bit more modest: 15 GB. Between the two services I have about six gigabytes used, which could certainly be stored on one of my hard drives... but once our data is uploaded to the cloud, specific advantages emerge that we don't want to give up easily. The problem is, plain and simple, the upload process. Uploading 800 megabytes of MP3 files to OneDrive took me four hours, and the blame for such slowness lies with the Internet provider. Until providers do something drastic to improve upload speeds, the cloud is unlikely to reach its full potential.
The offer
With that in mind, the latest storage news takes us to East Asia, where the Weiyun service from Tencent has decided to relaunch its free cloud space offer, delivering no less than one terabyte. The one-terabyte milestone is nothing new for Chinese providers. Several competitors made similar promises, and Weiyun itself talked about ten terabytes in August 2013, but apparently all that remained in limbo, and the current effective offer is one terabyte. Needless to say, the procedure to access that space is not so simple. First, you need to create a QQ account, then download the Tencent Cloud app for Android or iOS, log in with your new account, and once that's done, go to the Weiyun homepage to upload your files, provided you can get around the inconveniences of the Chinese language.
Is it worth it?
Personally, something tells me Tencent isn't very interested in providing this service to users in other parts of the world, and as far as I can tell, the feeling is mutual. It's no secret that the Chinese government wants to know everything its citizens do online, so storing personal files there doesn't seem like the brightest idea. This doesn't change the fact that Google and Microsoft know exactly what files I have but as the saying goes: "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't."
