You buy a brand new smartphone and start filling it with photos, videos, and apps. After some time, you see that dreaded message saying there's no more space on your device to store information. Now, what do you do?

This is a perfect moment to clear out all the “junk” from your phone to make space for new “junk.” But where do you store the old “junk”?

Gone are the days when we stored our digital files on CDs. Now, we prefer to put everything in the cloud to save our device’s information.

The goal of this post is to suggest a cheap (free, to be precise) way to back up photos and videos from your phone.

After a brief research and a few weeks of testing, I recommend 2 services for free file storage that have Android and iOS apps for data synchronization:

Cloud Mail.Ru

This was the service I liked the most and currently use. Cloud Mail.Ru (tip from Lucas Churchill) is a Russian email service that offers a whopping 100 GB of free space! That’s right, 100 GB! This service has Android and iOS apps for syncing photos and videos from your device.

To use this service, you’ll need to register (good luck with the Russian), where you’ll create a Mail.Ru email account. Then, simply download the app and use your account to sync photos and videos.

Initially, the app proved to be stable, uploading files one by one. I synchronized a total of approximately 7 GB of files to this service, and the app never froze.

While the synchronization is in progress, all the photos and videos you send can be found in the Mail.Ru web interface in a folder named Camera Uploads, where you can view all the images you’ve synced so far.

Mega

Mega is the successor of Megaupload. The site was launched on January 19, 2013, to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the end of Megaupload (thanks, Wikipedia).

This service provides 50 GB of free space, and there are also Android and iOS apps available for photo synchronization. The app does not support video synchronization. To sync photos, you need to create an account on Mega and download the app to your device. Then, activate the PhotoSync option in the app to start syncing.

During a few weeks of testing, I encountered some issues with the app. After syncing some images to the cloud, I cleared the app’s cache (available in the device’s settings). After that, the app “got lost” and didn’t know which photos were already sent to the cloud, resulting in re-uploading all the photos again.

Keep in mind that, for both solutions, the synchronization is not bidirectional; you only sync from the device to the cloud. If you want to download content that’s already in the cloud, you’ll have to access the service’s web interface and navigate there to find and download the content. It’s also important to note that the app must be open to sync content to the cloud; simply opening the app and locking the device screen won’t trigger the synchronization.

That’s it! Here’s a tip for those struggling with media storage on their devices. Cheers!