It’s hard to beat the insatiable Indian lust for freebies or cheap stuff.

But I doubt many Indians have clambered on the free online storage accounts.

Here’s a short list of some prominent free storage providers in the cloud. They all follow the freemium model (giving some stuff free and charging for upgrades).

Some online storage providers are more generous than others.

But what should cockle the Indian hearts is that most offer some free storage as a bait hoping users will upgrade to premium accounts later.

Free Online Storage Providers

* Box.com – Usually 5GB of storage but there’s a special promotion that lets you snag a whopping 50GB for free. Although the deal is meant for Dell Advantage customers, other people seem to be getting it without issues. Here’s the link – https://www.box.com/signup/o/dell_50gb_give_get

* DropBox – Free storage starts at 2GB but can go up to 18GB based on your referrals (500MB per referral). Supports Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile platforms

* Google Drive – 5GB for Free. You can not only store your files but share them with whoever you want and edit them together, from any device. Available for PC, Mac, Chrome OS, iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

* iCloud – Free 5GB storage for owners of Mac or iOS based devices like iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Your contacts, bookmarks etc can be automatically synced to the cloud. To access iCloud, you must create an Apple iTunes account (credit card required). Purchases of music, movies or TV shows from Apple’s iTunes do not count against the free 5GB storage.

* Amazon Cloud Drive – 5GB of Free online storage to store your photos, documents, videos and other junk.

There are several other free online storage providers but the ones I’ve listed would appear to have longevity and unlikely to shutdown any time soon.

The biggest advantage of an online storage account is that you have a backup to rely upon should your mobile phone get stolen or laptop suffer an unrecoverable crash.

But as with all free stuff, there are bound to be some limitations. In this instance, the limitations could be security, size of the file and bandwidth.