7 Great Free Non US-based Storage Sites

The US has many great storage sites like Google Drive, Microsoft Onedrive, and Dropbox. But, unfortunately the US government has a terrible record of spying on and forcing American online storage companies to turn over data on all of their customers regardless if any customer did anything wrong. In addition, I don’t believe any one country should completely dominate the Internet so I think it is good to use storage companies in many different countries. This article will discuss 7 great free non US-based storage sites.

files.inbox.lv (Latvia) – 10 GB free

I have used inbox.lv for a while now, and think it is a great email and storage service. Make sure you login into the account at least once every 3 years, otherwise your account may be deleted for inactivity. You can upload files up to 1.5 GB in size.

Yandex disk (Russia) – 10 GB free

Files supposedly never expire. Yandex is the #1 site in Russia. I have used Yandex for a few years now, and find it to be quite fantastic. Yandex.com is a pretty good competitor to bing.com and google.com, in my opinion. (note yandex.com is the English version of the search engine. Yandex.ru is the Russian language version of the search engine). One cool thing about the disk.yandex.com service is that if you upload a video file, you can play the file directly from your Yandex Disk account. Yandex has a syncing software you can download from the site. Yandex Disk also has a smartphone apps which you can download from the various app stores.

baidu yun (百度云) (Mainland China) – 5 GB free

Baidu is the #1 site in Mainland China, and its online storage is pretty good. Yun means cloud in Chinese. Baidu cloud is only in Chinese, so here are the steps for signing up for a Baidu account if you don’t know Chinese.
Steps for signing up for a Baidu account:
This link allows you to sign up for a Baidu account from outside Mainland China. Basically, 手机号 means your mobile phone number. Pick the country code and then type in your name. You can look up the name of your country in Chinese, and try to find that. But, otherwise just look for the country code for your country. For example, +65 for Singapore. 用户名 means the username you want. 密码 is the password you want to use. 验证码 is the verification code or CAPTCHA. You will probably be send an SMS to your mobile phone number, and the code is probably what you will need to enter in the box.
注册 means to register. Make sure you fill out everything appropriately and you confirm the code you got to your phone. After all this, you should have a working Baidu account. Once you have a Baidu account, go to yun.baidu.com, and I recommend you click on 帐号登录. Then, type in your username and password and click on 登录(which means login). After that, I recommend you use Google translate or a Chinese dictionary if you want to learn the vocab.

weiyun (微云) (Mainland China) – 10GB free

Wei yun is the cloud for Wechat (weixin in Chinese). Wechat is one the top chat apps in the world, which hundreds of millions using it. First, download the Wechat app in Google Play or the Apple App store. Then create an account and make sure to create a username.

Then after creating the Wechat account, go to weiyun.com. Then click on the link that says 微信帐号登录. This means you will login with your Wechat id. Next, open up your Wechat app again and then scan the QR code on the computer screen with your smartphone. Next, after scanning the QR code, it will ask you for confirmation to login from the app. Make sure you accept in the app. I recommend using Firefox to login to wei yun in your computer.
To upload files or folders to weiyun, click on the icon that says 添加
Then, choose as you like.

上传 means to upload
文件 means files
文件夹 means folder
下载 means to download

jottacloud.com (Norway) – 5 GB free

After creating a jottacloud account, you can choose to download the iPhone/iPad app, Android app, Windows program, Mac OS X program, or to open the web interface. The company claims it has the world’s best privacy policy for as storage company, and is only under Norwegian jurisdiction (which is not part of the EU).

mega.nz (New Zealand, Germany, and worldwide) – 15 GB free. (15 GB free long term and 50 GB free for the first month)

Mega.co.nz was founded by Kim Dotcom along with others after megaupload.com was seized by the US government. The site later transitioned to just mega.nz. This site is quite fantastic. This might just be my favorite free service of the ones listed in this article. It is a registered company in New Zealand. Recently it seems the company transitioned many of the servers over to Germany, so that is why I included it in this list. A free account gets 50 GB for free, and supposedly all data is encrypted. Like disk.yandex.com, mega.nz also has a great syncing client you can download which works for Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, and Linux.

Hubic.com (France) – 25 GB free

(Edited 2018-11. Sadly, hubic.com no longer allows new free account creations, but hopefully will allow older accounts to still be used according to this link.)

This site is yet another excellent online storage site. This site is owned by OVH, a major French data hosting site. Hubic also has smartphone apps that you can download.

Conclusion

All of the services listed I have personally used. I recommend all of them. What did you think of this article? Have anything to add to the discussion? Let’s discuss it in the comments below.