OneDrive vs Google Drive vs iCloud — Which Cloud Backup Actually Suits You?

A customer came into the shop last November with a broken iPhone and a story I've now heard dozens of times. She'd replaced the phone that morning, got home, started restoring it from iCloud, and discovered that the last four years of family photos weren't there. Her free 5GB of iCloud had quietly filled up in 2020. The sync had been silently failing since.

We recovered most of them, in the end, through a mix of email attachments, WhatsApp conversations, and her old laptop's cache. But the look on her face is the reason I'm writing this. OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud: what each one actually does, what's free, what you pay for, and how to set up one that doesn't quietly stop working while you aren't looking.

Read my guide on how to back up your PC properly for the full picture. Cloud sync is brilliant for convenience and for protecting against hardware failure. It's just not a complete backup strategy on its own.

The Short Version

If you want the three-sentence summary:

• OneDrive if you use Windows and Microsoft Office. Best value if you already pay for Microsoft 365.
• Google Drive if you live in Gmail, use Google Docs, or have an Android phone. Biggest free tier.
• iCloud if you have an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and especially if you have all three.

If you use a mixture of everything, pick the one that matches the device where most of your stuff actually lives.

OneDrive Best for Windows users

OneDrive is built into Windows 11. Your Documents, Pictures and Desktop folders can sync to it automatically, and Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) saves there by default.

Free: 5GB.

Paid: The real value is Microsoft 365 Personal at around £5.99/month. You get 1TB of OneDrive and the full Office suite for Word, Excel etc. If you'd have bought Office anyway, OneDrive is effectively free.

Where it shines: The "Files On-Demand" feature means files show up in File Explorer without using any disk space until you open them. On a laptop with a small SSD, that alone makes OneDrive worth using.

Watch out for: OneDrive loves to "help". By default in Windows 11 it'll quietly move your Documents and Desktop folders into the cloud, which confuses a lot of people. If you don't want that, open OneDrive settings → Backup → Manage backup, and untick the folders you don't want synced.

Google Drive Best free tier

Google Drive is the most generous of the three on free storage, and because it's browser-based it works the same on any device: Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, Chromebook.

Free: 15GB (shared with Gmail attachments and Google Photos).

Paid (Google One): £1.59/month for 100GB, £2.49/month for 200GB, £7.99/month for 2TB.

Where it shines: Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are built in and free. If you're happy to ditch Microsoft Office entirely, you can live inside Google's suite and never pay for a productivity licence again. It's also the easiest one to share a file with someone: just a link.

Watch out for: 15GB sounds like a lot until your Gmail has a decade of attachments in it. If you're near the limit, Gmail stops receiving new mail until you clear space. The Drive web app also doesn't back up your whole PC the way OneDrive's folder sync does. You'd use Google Drive for Desktop for that, which is a separate install.

iCloud Best for Apple households

iCloud is invisible and brilliant if everything you own has an Apple on the back of it. Photos from your iPhone show up on your Mac within seconds. Messages, notes, reminders, Safari tabs all just appear everywhere.

Free: 5GB.

Paid (iCloud+): £0.99/month for 50GB, £2.99/month for 200GB, £8.99/month for 2TB. Family Sharing means the 200GB and 2TB tiers split across up to six people.

Where it shines: Nothing else touches it for Apple-to-Apple sync. If your iPhone gets lost or broken, restoring to a new one from iCloud is genuinely painless. iCloud Private Relay (a built-in VPN-ish thing) and Hide My Email are nice extras for privacy.

Watch out for: iCloud on Windows is functional but clunky. If you're a Windows user with an iPhone, your photos will sync but it's not a joyful experience. And 5GB free is laughable in 2026. Most iPhone users run out within a year, at which point you're paying.

Side-by-Side

Which One Do I Actually Recommend?

For most people I see in St Helens running a Windows PC with an iPhone, the honest answer is: pay for Microsoft 365 Personal and let iCloud do the phone photos. That gets you Office, 1TB of cloud storage, and a reliable auto-backup of your photo library, for around £6/month between the two.

If you don't use Office at all and live in Gmail, Google One at £1.59/month for 100GB is excellent value, and will easily cover a typical family's photo and document needs.

The Golden Rule: 3-2-1

Cloud sync covers part of the picture. The proper rule for anything you can't afford to lose is 3-2-1:

• 3 copies of your data
• on 2 different types of media (e.g. your PC's SSD + the cloud)
• with 1 copy offsite (cloud counts)

For most home users, that works out as: your files on your PC, an external hard drive you plug in once a month, and a cloud sync service. If one of the three fails, the other two still have you. See my full backup guide for the practical setup.

Mark

Mark has been fixing computers since the late '90s and went self-employed in 2008. Based in St Helens since 2013, he works evenings and weekends from his home in Laffak — friendly, affordable repairs for PCs, laptops, and Macs. See reviews on Google