The latest and greatest cloud storage providers are doing it for free! You have to wonder why some of the big names in cloud storage are providing many gigs of free storage space, but it sure is worth using. If you’ve ever had a computer die on you, you realize what a pain in the butt it is to recover what you lost.

Sometimes you can never recover files. Projects you’ve done for work may be on a shared drive, but maybe not. Personal items may still be in their original place, but odds are strong they have been deleted. If you have photos in your computer, usually you delete them from your camera to make space for more pictures, but you should have them backed up somewhere.

Sure you can spend a hundred dollars or so and get an external hard drive, but those can also fail. That’s where the cloud comes in. Cloud storage providers back up their content (your content) so it can’t get lost. They also provide a secure place to store your data, whether it is photos, videos, word processing documents, or music files. That should give you peace of mind – if you’ve already taken advantage of them.

But what are your free choices? Amazon is now providing up to 5 gigabytes for free. You can add up to 15 more for free if you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, or you can pay a dollar per year per additional gig of storage.

Next is SkyDrive from Microsoft. Lots of people put down Microsoft and their products because of Windows OS factors, put SkyDrive is pretty amazing, and you get 25 Gigs of storage for free.

Individual file size is limited (at this point) to 100MB, but that covers mostly everything except video files. Right now there is no premium plan for larger files or more storage. Who knows what the future holds there.

Apple’s iCloud is giving you 5 gigs of storage, plus song space for tunes you get from their iTunes store. iCloud is also considered to be one of the easier cloud storage providers to navigate around in, since all the files are kept in one virtual place; it’s just like having another drive on your computer.

Which is similar to DropBox. DropBox is designed to be a shared space. Do you work with large files with people at various locations around the US and the world? DropBox allows you all to access and share files very easily.

Of course Google is at this, too. Google’s Document sharing has been in place for a few years and allows multiple users to update shared documents, even making changes simultaneously. It also will allow the most space, when you start talking about paid cloud. They max out at sixteen terabyte, which is pretty darn much space. For right now it’s free to use whatever space you need, but the cost will eventually be around 25 cents per gig annual fee.

It would seem all these services hope to hook you on ease of use and reliability and eventually they will start charging once you feel you can’t live without them. (Remember when almost no homes had cable TV and internet? Now we have to have them. Same story will most likely happen with the cloud.)

For now though, cloud storage providers are literally giving it away, and you almost certainly should take advantage of that. Your most important files should be backed up regularly and somewhere other than your main hard drive. Having cloud storage is an easy choice at this point – what provider you use is up to you.

Trying all of the available cloud storage providers in a limited capacity will give you a feel for their interface and ease of use.