DON'T FALL INTO THE FREE CLOUD STORAGE TRAP WITH A NEW PC

THOSE GIGABYTES YOU GET FROM DROPBOX, ONEDRIVE, OR GOOGLE DRIVE WON'T STICK AROUND FOREVER UNLESS YOU PAY.

- MICHAEL CRIDER

Cloud storage is a big business, and it's sold by the same corporations that make components of the laptops that are stocked on store shelves all over the world. So it makes sense that they're giving away "free" cloud storage with the purchase of new PCs. But exercise a smidgen of caution before you load up a hundred gigs or so of cloud space with your essential documents or precious memories. Unlike the soupçon of free storage given away with new accounts at places like OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive, the larger freebies that are associated with a new laptop purchase (fave.co/3qL40Hf) come with a time limit.

This concept will be familiar if you've ever accepted a free trial for, say, Norton Antivirus after booting up a new laptop. After a year or so, the freebies disappear unless you pay. But while antivirus software (fave.co/3CnDHuk) is somewhat redundant on modern machines (built-in solutions like Windows Security [fave.co/3tXSVPP) are good enough for many people), cloud storage is so useful and so in demand that users will be caught in a lurch if they use it for a while and aren't ready to pay up.

WHICH CLOUD STORAGE SERVICES OFFER FREE STORAGE BOOSTS?

Here's a short breakdown of the larger cloud storage providers and which ones will give you freebies when you purchase a new machine.