pCloud Review & Deep Dive Tutorial 2020

[Music] hi and welcome back to cloudwords.net and another p cloud review which is going to be a little different because as you might have seen from the length of this video it is going to be a deep dive version in this deep dive i'm going to review the software obviously but i'm going to focus much more on how to use it and what kind of features you have basically on offer that you can use when signing up for ap cloud for the pcloud service now if you're short on time i highly recommend you watch the short pcloud review version that basically compresses everything that you can see here in this video in probably four to five minutes and i'll leave you the video here in the description above so you can view that as well and as this video is quite lengthy you will find in the description box you will find time stamps so that you can navigate the video and the chapters that interests you um the most you can just click on the time stamp and then the video would jump on to the right section of the video obviously i would love for you to watch the whole thing because it's been quite a lot of work to put all this together and i myself have been reviewing cloud storage service for probably the last 10 years and on cloud words we have reviews of over 50 cloud storage services and pcloud is certainly one of our favorite providers so it's currently as of the recording of this video on number two of our best list so in this video what we're going to do is we're going to jump into several features of p-cloud we are going to talk about how does file synchronization work what is pcloud drive and what is the difference between pcloud drive and file synchronization and how do these two things tie together and make up for a good cloud storage strategy also we are going to look at how you can use um the media streamer to create your own music playlists and then stream them from pcloud wherever you are and also we are going to look at a very important pcloud feature which is pcloud encryption that describes the end-to-end encryption of um secure file transfer because usually files are only encrypted on transit and at rest on the server but there is also the option to encrypt your files client-side so i hope you join me on this journey on this deep dive journey also since this is the probably the first video that is um that is in this deep dive format i would really love for you to leave a comment if you like this format despite the length and if you would like us to produce more of these deep dives of other services if you have a suggestion what service we review next where do you want to see a deep dive about next please leave a comment and before we continue also subscribe to the channel and hit the like button because this helps the youtube algorithm to push our videos forward and to gain even more subscribers so we can produce more videos for you guys thank you very much and now let's get into pcloud p cloud pricing and plans now there are a little bit of developments in the cloud storage world regarding pricing a couple of years ago we only saw month to month or annual pricing for your cloud storage plans that's how most people are are used to using cloud storage then we had a little bit of a development where you saw a lot of weird cloud storage services popping up offering unlimited storage obviously those cloud storage services went bust now we're seeing another trend which is lifetime cloud storage plans now lifetime cloud storage plans are interesting because you pay an upfront fee say a couple hundred dollars and then you get access for life to that cloud storage account and pcloud is a i think it's one of the first services who really made this um pricing scheme popular and you can get p cloud lifetime storage plans but there are obviously some caveats to the lifetime plans that we are going to discuss in this video and if you're interested in that obviously stick around and there are other providers now more and more offering these lifetime plans you can still choose the month-to-month payments and you're certainly most flexible with that because then you're not locking yourself in but obviously you get a lot of savings when going for lifetime cloud storage now i'll show you the different plans and pricing methods you can choose with p cloud and so that's a little bit easier for you to understand i'll hop onto my screen so follow me now here we are on the main um pricing plan so when you clicked on a on the link in the description box below or on cloudwords you will find this plan and you can hear choose between annual and lifetime and as you can see here i am um in euros but the same it would be the same us dollar price so you could switch the language to whatever or the country to whatever um to whatever you are in and then um you would then see this price in us dollars and usually it comes heavily discounted um here now it's 65 off we do have several discounts on cloud woods on a regular basis um i mean black friday obviously would be the most common case that that you might know but here you can choose between annual and lifetime plans now lifetime is 350 euros for two terabytes and it will give you uh as i said two terabytes of storage and also it gives you two terabyte of share link traffic which means when you go in to pcloud and share a link and upload files so obviously this is the the bandwidth that you will get with that cloud storage service and you can use those two terabytes um per month basically as you will um as will use your shared traffic that they'll they do this because obviously they want to avoid people using this as a file sharing service where people start uploading movies and then share those movies with their friends and family or other people even on forums and they will be like a second second mega upload for those of you who still know this so that's why they put a bandwidth limit in here and you'll get a 30 days trash history meaning when you put things into your trash it'll be uh it'll be recovered now personally i can tell you that i'm on a on a premium family plan as you can when you scroll down these are the personal plans here which is certainly good enough for individuals but if you have a family and more than one or two people are going to be using pcloud you should go for the family plan which has a bit more flexibility you also have the one-time flexible lifetime payment of 500 or 500 euros get two terabytes of storage but you can invite up to five users or family members can use that account and then you can basically spread the um spread the storage between those different accounts so you can allocate storage to your spouse or to your children that they can use at their own leisure basically so that's a family plan and a more advanced option is the pcloud business plan which has a lot more options and a lot more flexibility and you can try the business plan for free you can then invite co-workers that get a certain storage quota and so on but for the personal uh users i would really suggest you look at the premium plus plan or the premium plan which usually is the best bang for your buck and if you have more than a couple of people using the storage plan you go for the family plan now when i open up pcloud here you can see that i am on the family lifetime plan and i'm using quite a lot of storage uh already 1.7 terabytes and how i use this storage and how i manage my cloud storage um basically i will show you in another video or in basically in the same video but you can check it out in the jump marks if it interests you how for example pcloud drive or pcloud sync works now this has been like a little bit of an introduction into um the pcloud lifetime plans and the pcloud annual plans i hope you enjoyed this so this was just a short introduction into the pcloud pricing plans and i hope that you have now a better overview of what is the best plan for your needs and next up we are going to dive deeper into how pcloud works and how i'm using it for myself and also for my company one of the newer additions as of july 2020 is that pcloud now finally allows users to pick between two different data centers before pcloud only was available in the us in texas i believe dallas texas so had a data center there which was obviously a little bit unsecure for people who are looking for the right amount of data security and data protection especially when using this as a business and you are in the european union so there might be some data protection regulations that you need to adhere to and you are not allowed to store files in the us now pcloud is a swiss company so technically all files and all that falls under swiss data protection laws which are probably one of the strongest um in the world but now fortunately pcloud has the option for new users to pick the european union as a data center option which is in luxembourg so it will comply with a lot more of the regulations for european users and also offer maybe a little bit of peace of mind for people who don't like to see their file hosted in the us doesn't matter if it's if it falls under swiss privacy laws or not existing users will be able to switch data centers at some point in time we don't have an exact launch date yet so stay tuned for that but we are very happy to see this as an option i just wanted to include this into this video so you know that you have this option and you switch between data centers at the beginning of signing up pcloud drive is probably my favorite peak cloud feature because this is what i use the most and the drive concept is obviously something that some of you might know from external hard drives or even connected network drives that you can access on your computer or on your network and those files are obviously then not stored locally on your computer thus they do not take up hard drive space and that is the beauty of pcloud drive now let's say you opted for the two terabytes plan which i have so you're getting basically a two terabyte external hard drive in the cloud that you can access from anywhere and connect it as a drive to your computer now obviously it doesn't work exactly like an external hard drive because obviously you need an internet connection and that's the only downside that pcloud drive has however as we've seen another chapter of this video with file synchronization you can take those files from drive offline so you can access them anywhere even if you don't have an internet connection and then enable a two-way synchronization where files that you add to that folder will also be synchronized to another folder via pcloud drive now this is basically already the beauty of it and i want to show you how this looks like in the peak cloud app on my computer so let's hop straight in as you can see here i'm i i just went into the settings menu here in pcloud drive and one thing that is quite useful is when you upload files to pcloud drive it will add files to the cache and you can increase the cache size so we will have basically more room to play with when you access files locally or you can clear the cache if you're like very constrained in your space that you have in your computer and then it will free up some of the hard drive space now as we've seen in another set chapter of this video pcloud drive sits on your computer just as a network for example here i connected my uh my nas uh where i store all my videos and you can see with by this little icon that this is a drive that's basically embedded uh via a network connection now when i go into um my pcloud drive i can just open the cloud drive here and it looks the same as a network drive and you can find all your files here and you can access files by right-click and then share files invite people to folders request upload of files or as we've seen in another chapter synchronize or make files available offline and also here on the left side you can see it's an exact representation of course from the files that i have here in my pcloud drive folder because it sits as discussed previously in the cloud now i can upload files here on my mac and then it will obviously show directly after here on the drive folder but the same thing happens when you delete files so when i go into a folder and if i delete one of these folders obviously this is that what you have to know is that then these files will be deleted from the drive as well and you won't have access to those files anymore via the drive and that's basically what i wanted to show you i use this feature all the time i use it as an external hard drive in the cloud to free up a lot of space especially when i'm when i'm traveling and this has been highly useful also you can use um as we've seen before the drive to invite people to these folders and then collaborate and receive files from um from anybody that that you'd like to and you have all the different access that you have with file sharing and synchronization as well i hope i could show you a little bit how drive works and get you a feel if that's something that might be useful and we'll see us in the next chapter pcloud and file sharing now file sharing is probably at the core of each cloud storage service because the idea is that obviously you upload files to the cloud and then be able to access them from anywhere in the world and also other so that other people can access those files those could be documents can be photos can be videos can be any type of file that you want other people to see and you maybe you don't want to publish these photos on facebook or instagram or what have you because those are private family photos that you want actually no one to see and that's where cloud storage services come in where you can upload a folder or a file or whatever document you want and then you create a public or private link and pcloud works in the same way you upload a document you create a shared link and then you send it off to whoever wants to receive it or has to receive it and in this video i'll just going to show you briefly how this works and the good thing is with pcloud you have a lot of options to really fine tune the uh the the sharing permissions and who actually gets access to what and i hope you join me in this section of the video and i'm going to show you how it works right now so i'm here in my pcloud account it looks pretty um pretty standard i mean we have a couple of folders here okay so here is the the cloud words folder where we upload a youtube video so that our editor can edit uh edit our videos and these folders can be shared with external people so you can have you have different options here when you click right click you can either share the link of that of that folder and then you have different options that you see here you can either copy the link and then just share it to anybody and then people will have access to it or you say i want a password protected so you can add a password protection to that folder so that you can add a different layer or another layer of security to it what's really interesting is that you can add an expiration date so you might want to send a document to a contractor and that link expires after a week or so of the contractor i don't know it doesn't react to whatever whatever you're sending them so this is where you where these expiration dates come in very handy you can even personalize um the links with a logo and stuff i've not done this yet i'll you could use your company um photo here or you could do if you have like if you want to share the family album you could use like a a picture of your family so that it's absolutely clear what this folder is about and everyone knows what's happening and these are just a couple of the options that you have with sharing files now you can also invite people to a folder if other pcloud users shall collaborate in this folder and also upload files into that folder you invite these people they do need to have a pcloud account obviously to be able to work in this folder but you could also invite them here with this if you share the link people do not need to have a pcloud account in order to access those files and you could also create an upload link to that folder where you can say okay anyone can upload basically files to this folder this is very useful if for example you had a big party a wedding for example and you want to collect all the different pictures that people took on that wedding you could say okay anyone can upload photos to this folder so you can collect from anyone the photos and then later on go in and sort through all the ones that you'd like to keep so i use this quite a lot not only for my for my business where i work with contractors but also on a personal level where i work a lot when i'm at a party and i really just want to have all the photos from all the people because you might miss the best photo of the night so here is where people can upload that overall there are a lot of different options that you have as you can see with these with these uh folders and files that you can share i showed you now the folder sharing but obviously this also works with individual files and i really hope i could show you a little bit how this works now there's a different feature called file request feature where you can also just generate um a folder and then people can upload files into it and i'm going to dedicate a separate video to this but file sharing is as i said before at the core of cloud storage and pcloud works really well and we're using it here at our office and at home basically on a daily basis pcloud and file synchronization now file synchronization is probably one of the most well-known concepts of cloud storage services and what most people want to achieve when they start thinking about getting a solution at cloud storage solution the concept has been made famous probably by dropbox back in 2008 because they were like the first uh company to show that you don't need an ftp server to actually get access to all your files no matter where you are and they made this synchronization concept available to to the larger crowd by giving two gigabytes of free storage to a lot of people and that's what made them basically popular now fast forward 12 years now bat in 2020 there are other providers that use this concept and maybe take a little bit to another level or take a different uh spin to it and that's what we're going to talk about in this chapter of the video we're going to talk about the pcloud file synchronization and it works a lot in combination with the pcloud drive so pcloud drive works in conjunction with file synchronization because you need the pcloud drive in the cloud where files will be transferred and then synchronized between all of your machines but you could have a computer a a macintosh computer for home use and then you have another work computer that's a windows machine and could synchronize files back and forth and we're going to discuss this scenario in this video and if that's something that sounds interesting stick around and follow me to my computer okay so here we are basically in two systems i have here on the left side uh this is my windows computer and i have on the right side i have my macintosh computer and i'm connected to the pcloud drive now remember that when you are when you look at files on pcloud drive you can only look at them if you are connected to the internet that's what drive is required it will require an internet connection because it can then download the files for you to view if you sync files however then you can also access files offline so i have a test folder of photos and videos that i do want to sync now the test folder i will start it here from my windows computer i open the pcloud software i add a new sync and then i can choose between a local folder or a pcloud drive folder when you choose a pcloud drive folder basically do the other way around because you'll make files available offline from the pclone drive folder but what i want to do is i want to choose a local folder to sync it up to the pconnect drive so that i can then sync it to other computers or access it on the go wherever i am so i choose a local folder and go to the desktop and i choose the test photos and videos folder selecting it and when i hit add synchronization it will add the folder to the sync file synchronization stack and you can see it's transferring the files at roughly three four five megabytes per second and look at what happens here on my on the right hand side on my macintosh computer it's already created on the pcloud drive in the cloud the test photos and videos and you can see here on the green check mark that it's it's synchronized um to the cloud and basically ready for us to view and ready for us to use and when it's done you can see everything is uploaded everything is downloaded synchronization is complete and anything everything here is complete as well now as i said before it's in the pcloud drive so you cannot access it offline but what is what if you want to have like a two-way sync so you want to have this folder available offline and also drag and drop files in here because you're working on this folder at home but then when you're at the office or wherever you have the other computer you want to have access to the files that you've just edited or added now of course if you have an internet connection you could use pcloud drive and you don't have to sync it to your local files but for the sake of this video or for this section of the video i'd like to do the offline sync so you just right click here and select offline synchronization and then it would create a synchronization folder from pcloud drive to your local computer i hit add new sync and then it would sync up the files local you can see here my favorites tab i've already created the test photo folder is created and it's now syncing the files here you can see the files are already popping up and this works when the file is smaller quite fast obviously when you have bigger files if a goodbye to two gigabytes that might take a while until everything is synchronized but it will mostly depend on your internet connection now i have a two-way sync between my macintosh computer and my other machine here what you can see now is let me minimize that so we can have a look at this windows folder when i pull up this again it's now properly synchronized when i add a few photos to this folder it will upload these folders these photos and after a smaller break you can see here those photos are already popping up because it's being synchronized that's how fast it goes it's almost instant obviously the bigger the files are the more uh the longer you have to wait that's just uh the nature of how this works and then you can do all the other things with those files that you know already from pcloud like sharing sharing files um etc so i really hope that this gave you like a good overview of how file synchronization works we are going to look at a few more examples of pcloud drive in this video and if you're interested in more aspects of this software stay tuned for the next chapter now let's talk encryption i think encryption is probably the most important aspect that has changed in the cloud storage industry over the last probably five years or so because when dropbox first announced their service back in 2008 your files were encrypted but only on transit and at rest on the servers but now that more and more people are using cloud storage services privacy has become a huge concern so a lot of the newer cloud storage services they put an emphasis on encryption but not only transit encryption and at rest encryption on the servers but also end-to-end encryption so that only you or the people you want to have access to your files not even the employees or the company could look at your files or even worse um you would fall victim to man in the middle attack and then other people would have access to your files that would be the worst case scenario and pcloud introduced uh personal or private end-to-end encryption a couple of years ago i'm not quite sure exactly when they started this but it's certainly a very welcome addition to the service and something that uh before that was actually enabled was on our list of on our wish list basically for for this service to be a very good contender in the field now private encryption means you when you pick private encryption you choose a key a password that you should never forget because once chosen this password and you want to access to your files you need this password to decrypt all the files but if you forget it there's no way to recover it the basic concept where hey put in your email address and we'll send you a password obviously does not work because only you will have access to your files so choose passwords carefully for private encryption because there's no way you can recover them later on i recommend using a password manager and you can find uh reviews of passive images in this channel and on cloudwoods.net or just use pen and paper and write it down and put it somewhere where it's safe pcloud offers encryption as a paid add-on and that is something which is a bit unfortunate because uh we can clearly see a development of encryption being like the standard in new and upcoming cloud storage services but nevertheless it's a it's a very good addition to to the service and uh you should really consider if those roughly four bucks a month are worth it to you the added privacy is is worth it to you and let me show you a little bit how that works now on my computer so as you can see uh i'm logged in here into my standard um pcloud account you can see the files and folders that i've created but there's obviously something else that you can see would because you don't see the encrypted files here those are moved into an external folder here called crypto folder and when you click on it you are asked to paste in or type in your password to unlock the folder so if i do this here so i'm pasting in my crypto pass and it says crypto is unlocked and you can see here are the locked folders now the downside with private encryption here on pcloud is that you have no sharing uh or yeah you have no sharing capabilities with these folders so when you click on the three dots we would normally find your your sharing information you could say okay request files but it says you cannot create a link to encrypted file or folder that is so you lose certainly collaboration features in exchange for a higher level of privacy but when once you have access to uh the crypto folder you can obviously view your data i i have nothing in here in the test folder but you could add obviously just as you normally would via drag and drop or upload files via the the upload menu and then once you're done basically you can lock the the crypto folder again so that we would require a password and obviously you can also access the crypto folder on the on the desktop uh interface so there's a menu item called unlock crypto so now you see okay the crypto folder is basically locked because we don't have any access to the files and then you could by typing in your password unlock the crypto folder and then you would have access to the crypto folder on your macintosh or windows computer just as a regular folder and you can work with it now how much does uh pcloud crypto cost well this is obviously the downside of the service because when you look at the plans here as i said you have the lifetime or the annual plans but look let's look at the annual plans just for the sake of your argument you're looking at roughly eight dollars per now this is euros but the price will be the same in dollars you look at roughly eight dollars per month for a two terabyte version of a p cloud um but that does not include p cloud uh crypto because when you go into the encryption folder you can see okay it costs an additional 47.88 or roughly four dollars per month so you would end up paying roughly 12 per month now obviously there's the lifetime option and if you go for p-cloud i would probably recommend go for the lifetime version where you could then pay 125 for the lifetime version and an additional 350 for the storage so basically you combine those and then you don't have to pay anything on an annual basis and roughly after three four years you are ending up having a pretty cheap a pretty cheap cloud storage solution with encryption now there is another service that includes encryption which is uh sync.com and the pricing looks a bit different they offer for individuals a basic plan for eight dollars per month and they include two terabytes of storage and the only downside here is that it is built annually so there is no month-to-month option if you for example just want to check it out but you can look at all the the features that they're offering and private internet encryption is included here for this eight dollars per month so you will you would end up a little bit cheaper with sync.com but on the other hand sync does not have lifetime plans so you would basically have to find out for yourself what is the best solution now no matter what solution you choose for yourself i really would recommend you not use anything that doesn't offer private encryption no matter which cloud storage service you choose so dropbox for example does not have for the consumer plan does not have private encryption nor does uh onedrive at the time of this video so you will really have to choose carefully uh when deciding okay how much is your privacy worth and personally i think four dollars a month is a fair trade for an additional layer of security file requests is a very interesting and useful feature because it allows you to basically collaborate with people even if they don't have a pcloud account because people can just upload files to a folder where you have enabled file requests so this can be either from contractors that you're working with designers or other media producers or this can be also used on a personal private level when for example you are at a wedding and you want to collect all the photos from different people that were that were taken on that wedding so you can send via email or or messenger you can send a link and all people with different cameras can upload their camera roll basically into that shared folder without them having to create a pcloud account and this is what i'm going to show you right now here in my computer so as you can see here i'm in my test photos and videos folder there are like file previews and stuff but now what i want to do is i want to actually enable this folder as uh as an upload folder um so these three dots here always indicate that there is like an option menu behind the folder or the file that you can select so in this case the only thing that you need to do is select the three dots and say request files and then it would generate a file request link and as usual for other shared links you have certain settings and can add a message for people that are seeing these file requests you can add an upload limit if you don't want to have people upload too much to your to your folder and then use up all your quota and you can set an expiration date which is also quite useful now and the only thing that you need to do now is basically copy this link and then share it to other people that that want to have that won't have that should have access to the folder now let me just to demonstrate how this looks open up a private browser window so i'm not logged into pcloud right now because it's a well a private window and i paste in the url of the link and what happens is that it will say okay this is a file request and we can now upload your files here by just drag and dropping or just selecting files from your system menu and then you add your name and then it will appear and upload folder with your name in the folder that you've created the request for so you would just add your name here and then let's just drag a few files into the drag and drop line and i would say okay let's just upload these files and you can see the uploaded process 100 uploaded files are uploaded now let's look back into my pcloud cloud account and see how this looks in the folder so i can close that and you can see here is a new folder created three files from mauricio on july 8th so you know exactly how many files were uploaded by that user you can go in and then preview your files and all looks good so that is the beauty of file requests and it's a very useful feature that i use basically on a daily basis and i'm very happy that more and more cloud storage services are actually offering this and pcloud is a very good example that this can work very easily you can use peak cloud as a media streaming solution because pica would stream the most common media files like mp4s or mp3s and this is especially useful if you have been digitalizing your music collection for songs that are not available on the streaming platforms like itunes or spotify if you have a very old collection for example or for movies they're not available on netflix or any other streaming service so you could use pcloud to stream your music files and let's just hop into my screen now and i can show you how that works so here you can see i have a few audio files mp mp3s and they are listed here you can you would click on them and then it would stream inside the web player but um obviously probably no one is really using it inside the web player that's why i've also opened up um my phone here so you can see you can also stream media files on your phone and on the go so what you could do is you could say okay let me just select these three songs here and i want to add a playlist so let's create a new playlist my favorite songs i say add to playlist and then files are added to the playlist when you update the screen then you have a new playlist with your favorite songs and you could then go in see the songs and then hit play and then it would just play the song for you and you could scrub um scrub back and forth i'm always going to do this with my mouse but i cannot do it with the mouse because it's on my phone you can scrub back and forth and play the song in pcloud and the same thing uh works for say video files because i frequently uh upload videos uh for cloudwoods obviously to cloud for so that my video editor can process them and add them and re-upload them to youtube so i could just go in here so the only thing that you need to do is basically hit on the file and then it would open up the media player the streaming player and then you could say okay let's play and preview the video and as you can see it's it's streaming nicely long so you can also use this to manage and view even your videos these are just a few of the opportunities and possibilities that you have with a p-cloud media streaming it works quite well obviously if you have a subscription to spotify it might not be like your your daily go-to music streaming platform but for the occasional rare song that you're not getting anywhere in any streaming platform but you want to listen on the go that's certainly a good solution so there you have it this was our pcloud deep dive and obviously this was a fairly long video but i hope the chapters you found the right track that you were basically interested in and if you like this format please leave us a comment so that we know that these kind of videos are appreciated and we can produce more of them also give it a thumbs up that helps us spread the word even more also i'm very interested in what kind of cloud storage are you using after viewing all these features do you think pcloud is a good option for you please leave a comment how you intend to use pcloud or how you are already using it or if you went for another cloud storage solution all of that please leave it in the comments i'll read all of them and then reply as soon as i can hopefully we're going to see us in my next video i'm mauricio for cloudwoods.net bye

Channel: cloudwards

Views: 22,380

Keywords: cloud storage, pcloud review, online backup, dropbox alternative, cloud storage providers, pcloud, p cloud, review, datacenters, europe, drive, pcloud drive, file sharing, file syncing, speed, crypto, file request, media streaming, security, privacy, encryption

Id: JQjtgQ4Iht4

Length: 40min 27sec (2427 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020