Is TeraBox worth it? Comparison and opinion

Web applications and "cloud" services are becoming more important for everyone, which has led companies to a very strong competition to decide who offers the best services in terms of quality and price.

Terabox competes directly with Dropbox, Google Drive, Mediafire and other services that allow you a cloud storage of any document or file. Just like the competition, they offer you free space and apps so you can use the service from a web browser or Android mobile device.

The biggest difference is the space that Terabox gives to new users: 1TB of “free” cloud storage… as long as you invite a friend. If you get someone to set up and sign up for a new Terabox account with your link, then you can unlock more storage. This was not the case in 2020 or part of 2021, but they have seen the need to change their policies of use

In this article I will express my opinion of Terabox and its pros and cons compared to similar services.

Related article:

The 5 best alternatives to Dropbox to store our files

Advantages and disadvantages of using Terabox

This service has garnered mixed reviews for virtually its entire history. Here are some of the features that can be considered as a Terabox advantage over other similar services:

• If you invite a friend from the Android app and they sign up, you unlock 1TB of storage for uploading files to the cloud.
• Upload and download times for files are not as limited as you might expect from a service that "gives away" its resources. They are fast.
• If you pay $3.49 a month, you unlock 2TB of storage (much more than other services).
• In the application they are always making discounts or giving away coupons so that the monthly payment is cheaper for you.
• They have an automatic backup option for certain files.

According to other users, the service has serious disadvantages when compared to Dropbox or Google Drive, among which I highlight the following:

• Individual files cannot be larger than 4 GB.
• You can't have more than 500 different files in a single folder.
• If you have the free version you cannot upload videos higher than 720p (HD).
• The free version contains ads and also the data is not strictly encrypted.
• It does not have an official client that can be installed on GNU/Linux.

Terabox opinion compared to other cloud storage services

For this we will take into account the free plan and the first Premium level of Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega and Terabox.

1. Dropbox in its free version offers a storage of 10 GB and an unlimited amount of transfer (the amount of data that we can send or download from the application from time to time), per user. With its premium version ($9.99 per month) the storage space increases up to 2 TB.
2. MEGA allows you to have a free account with 20 GB of storage space and a transfer amount limited by IP of 5 GB. If you contract the most basic subscription (€4.99 per month) the storage space goes up to 200 GB and the transfer to 1 TB.
3. Google Drive offers 15 GB for users who do not pay monthly for the service. It has no transfer limit. If you pay $1.99 a month the storage increases to 100 GB, and so there are several levels.

As you may have noticed, Terabox's competition does not advertise to its free users nor does it stop offering content encryption; It is better to point out that they do not come close to 1TB of free storage.

Keep in mind that if you pay $3.49 a month on Terabox, they stop showing ads, the encryption of your files is "activated" and the storage increases to 3 TB (much more than the other services mentioned above). If you are going to use this service for saving music or movies, it might be a good idea.

How to install Terabox on Android

The Android client for Terabox can only be installed if you have Android version 5.0 or higher. If you are interested in this service to save something specific or make a backup, do the following:

• Download the application from its official version in the Play Store.
  • In case you are not using the latest version of Android, you can search for the Terabox apk on an alternative site like apkmirror.
• Open the app and sign in to Terabox (you can also use the quick sign in with Google option).
• It will ask you to accept some permissions for reading and managing files on the system, after that you can upload whatever you want.
  • There is an additional option that allows you to automatically back up all the photos that are added to the gallery, by default it is disabled. I do not recommend activating it if you are in a free account, for security.

How to upload a file to Terabox on Android

Since we have the application installed, we can upload and download files by doing the following:

• Open the Terabox app.
• Find the file you want to upload and press the plus (+) button in the bottom right corner.
• If you tap on the “File”, “Album” or “Video” option you will be able to see the files that match that type, that you have sent through the application.

This procedure must be repeated with each file when necessary, it is not very complicated and it is more or less like what we do in applications such as Google Drive, Mediafire, Dropbox, etc.

Terabox opinion and final considerations

Although cloud storage services are very useful and popular, they are not a very reliable option. We don't know what they can do with our information because all those services are proprietary code. Even from a point of view away from privacy and more focused on the security of those files, we cannot trust ourselves either because we do not know the protocols of these companies.

The best backup can be done using an external hard drive, because do not forget that for cloud and "free" services, the only one who is really in the cloud is the end user, who also becomes the product of these services. Business.