Question Dropbox vs S3 vs ?

[miseaujeu]

Scenario: Amature musicians living in different cities that share tracks for overdubbing until song is complete.
Issue: File sizes get pretty big with multiple tracks of uncompressed source. Dropbox's free 1GB is too small.
Issue #2: We're failed musicians ... we have no money.

I've been looking at S3. I setup buckets and users with r/w access. I'm comfortable using the AWS Management Console but 3 of 5 are not very tech savvy. How can I make the tracks EASILY downloadable over PC, Mac, IOS and Android platforms? There could be a dozen folders each with 20 track files.

Any other service that might be a wiser choice? Again ... we're poor.

Thanks,
-M

 

[SiegeTank]

Microsoft OneDrive has a free limit of 5GB.

Not big enough?

Another option is to set up with an ISP hosting service. You can do that for as little as $5/month. Some might even be free but then there will be limits and other requirements. Then you can upload your files via FTP. Not sure if most ISP's have space limitations. I'm sure they do to some extent but in my years of using hosting providers I've never run into a cap.

 

[[40oz]]

To answer your AWS question as a general guideline...

Give each person an IAM user. Put them in a IAM group. Provide that group with the correct IAM policy to read and write from the s3 bucket you've made.

Give each IAM user an access key pair. They should protect these keys. Then use any number of GUI tools to interact with the s3 bucket using those access keys for authentication. Or write some easy command line scripts for them. Likely easier to find a GUI tool that supports s3 though, like Cyberduck on mac/windows; ES File Explorer on Android, and I'm sure there's some S3 file management apps that can utilize s3 also.

Of note, while S3 storage is cheap as hell, you'll lose your money on transferring data *out* of s3. Say your group downloads 500GB of data in a month from your s3 bucket. According to the AWS cost calculator, that alone will cost you about $45 or so. If you've got 4 people, and 100 tracks at 1GB each, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Play with the cost calculator yourself though:

Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator

If you're worried about costs, the $100/yr 1TB dropbox might be your best bet. You don't pay for transfer in/out, and it's super easy to use, and it's a flat rate you can plan for.

 

[PeteyPablo]

I think Google Drive gives you a free 15gb's.

 

[miseaujeu]

Thanks for the responses. Just as an update the S3 has been working very well and even my Luddite friends were able to figure out their various platform SFTP transfer programs.
[40oz] is certainly correct. The S3 storage is cheap however pushing a file up and then having it downloaded ( at least ) 4 times per revision is going to kill the cost for us. I'll probably continue to use Glacier as a permanent archive location but that will be all.

$100/yr 1TB dropbox is looking like the best bet for ease of use, team distribution ( with repeat ... oh my god so many repeat downloads ), and sufficient space for our working projects.

-M