File storage

What this shelf covers

Keeping files somewhere other people can reach them: synchronised drives, shared team spaces, link sharing, versions and the object storage that applications use directly.

Two products live under one name. Consumer-style sync, judged on speed and convenience. Business file management, judged on permissions, retention and what happens when somebody leaves.

Copies that exist to survive disaster belong in backup and recovery. Documents written and edited together sit closer to notes and wiki.

Sync is not a backup

This misunderstanding causes more data loss than any technical failure.

A synchronised folder mirrors what you do. Delete a file and it disappears everywhere. Encrypt a folder and the encrypted version is what every device receives, usually within minutes.

Version history helps within its window, and that window is short on most plans. What actually protects you is a separate copy that syncing cannot reach and that an attacker holding your credentials cannot delete.

Keep both. They solve different problems and neither substitutes for the other.

Permissions, sharing and the quiet leak

The most common exposure in this category is a link somebody created three years ago and forgot.

• Folder permissions by group rather than by individual.
• Link controls with expiry, passwords and download restrictions.
• External sharing rules, set centrally rather than per person.
• Sharing reports, showing what is currently open and to whom.
• Ownership transfer, when someone leaves the organisation.

Ask to see the sharing report during a trial. Any organisation that has used a file service for a few years finds something in it that should have been closed long ago.

Ownership matters just as much. Work files sitting in a personal account walk out of the building with their owner, and recovering them afterwards is a conversation nobody enjoys.

Performance and the practical experience

The daily experience comes down to how sync behaves under pressure.

Check what happens with large files, with a folder containing tens of thousands of small ones, and when two people edit the same document at once. Conflict handling varies from a clear prompt to two files with confusing names.

Selective sync and on-demand files matter for anyone whose archive is larger than their laptop. So does search, which should look inside documents rather than at filenames alone.

Mobile access deserves a test on a poor connection, since that is where offline availability either exists or does not.

Compliance, location and retention

For regulated work, three questions decide whether a product is usable at all.

Where files are stored and processed, and whether a region can be chosen. Who at the vendor can access content, and under what process. What retention and legal hold options exist, including whether a deleted file is genuinely gone or recoverable for a period.

Audit logging belongs with them. Knowing who opened, downloaded and shared a file is what turns an incident into an investigation rather than a guess.

What it costs

Team plans charge per user with a quota or with pooled capacity. Object storage charges per gigabyte stored, with separate fees for requests and for data leaving the provider.

Egress is the line that surprises people, particularly when files are served to customers or copied between regions. Retention of old versions adds up quietly, and so do accounts left active after people leave.

Ask what migration looks like before you need it. Moving several terabytes takes planning and sometimes costs money on the way out, which is the kind of detail collected in what pricing pages hide.

Choosing between the three shapes

Consumer sync products are cheap, pleasant, and built around one person rather than an organisation. They suit small teams whose main need is having the same files on several devices.

Business file platforms add group permissions, external sharing rules, retention policies, auditing and ownership transfer. They are worth the extra cost the moment leavers, clients or regulated material enter the picture.

Object storage is a different thing entirely: a place for applications to keep files, priced by volume and traffic, with no interface for staff at all.

Plenty of organisations end up running two of the three, which is fine as long as the boundary is stated. What causes trouble is work files quietly living in personal accounts, because nothing about that arrangement is visible until somebody leaves.