Mega Review: A Perfect Cloud Storage for You

Mega is one of my favourite cloud services, and although they aren’t the best for sure, I very often make the use of Mega either on my Android smartphone or my PC. Being a relatively new cloud service, found in 2013, Mega can really be proud of itself, as they’ve come a not-so-long way, BUT they improved much over this short time period.

It also has some controversial background, as it was shut down by FBI a few years ago when the owner of Mega was Kim Dotcom. Mega is now a company based in New Zeland, and they market themselves as ‘the privacy company’, although there are some privacy issues we’re going to talk about in the review below. But, let’s start with the features first.

Mega Cloud Features

Like every cloud service, Mega follows the same workflow, offering almost identical features, but falls short in terms of quality. For example, Mega’s image viewer integrated here will show the images with the arrows for navigating, which I don’t like.

It could be created as a simple slideshow, with nothing blocking my images. Nevertheless, this isn’t that big downside. What I very much like, however, is a unique chat feature that allows you to directly communicate with the other users of Mega, allowing for much more enhanced file sharing and syncing between the devices and users.

This feature is secure, and as Mega developers say, this is a very good substitute for Skype, as it’s much more secure, because it’s being handled by the Mega’s employees. On top of that, Mega can be downloaded on your smartphone or desktop, increasing its versatility.

As it’s a cloud service, it allows remote file access, and if you download it on your PC, it’ll create a sync folder, where you can just copy and paste files, and they’ll be automatically uploaded to Mega servers. Aside from a not-that-great image viewer, Mega boasts relatively interesting features, which I’m satisfied with.

Syncing and Sharing

When it comes to syncing and sharing, I’ll review the whole process in-depth for you. Generally, Mega isn’t the fastest cloud service I’ve ever used, but it’s solid for my needs. On top of that, Mega is a zero-knowledge service and has no insight into your file content, which is needed to perform block-level file copying, granting much higher speeds.

Selective sync, however, is supported by Mega and lets you choose which folders you want to sync with your cloud and not with the device, so you can now directly store the folders in your Mega account, which is great and improves space-saving on your hard disk.

If are downloading and uploading your data and it interrupts your other processes, chances are that speeds are at their maximum. No problem, Mega grants you complete control over download and upload speeds, which is a very nice feature.

For downloading the files, you don’t need to sign in to your account, but you need the encryption key and the link if you want to download someone else’s files. You can generate the link for downloading your data, but here, it’s a universal link, which is the same for every user that wants to download, and the encryption key also stays the same, which is kind of odd.

I’ve expected the links to be based on the user’s email address, so everyone can get a different encryption key.

Ease of Use and Speed

Uploading and downloading the data is very simple. As we mentioned, you can create your own Sync folder on the PC version and paste the files you want to be uploaded there. Downloading your own files is also simple, and you can to that without the link and encryption key, which is great.

Now, about the speeds. With my Internet speed of 5Mbps, I managed to upload 1GB of data in around 45 seconds, and the download was just a little bit faster, coming in around 35 seconds. I must admit that results are respectable, although I expected it to be a little faster, I like how reliable the upload and download processes are, so I’m happy with that.

Pricing

You can use Mega for free, with 50GB of space, which is awesome, as 50GB isn’t that small space. As there are four subscription plans, I created a list of them below, to make it more distinguishable:

• PRO-LITE: 4.99 Euros a month, 200 GB storage, 1TB Bandwidth
• PRO I: 9.99 Euros a month, 1 TB storage, 2 TB Bandwidth
• PRO II: 19.99 Euros a month, 4 TB storage, 8 TB Bandwidth
• PRO III: 29.99 Euros a month, 8 TB storage, 16 TB Bandwidth

Overall, these are good offers, but I dislike the limited bandwidth. In terms of value, Mega beats even some of the popular cloud services like SpiderOak and pCloud, but overall, not too impressive. I tried PRO I for this review, and I think it’s the most valuable plan for users of Mega.

Security

Mega comes with zero-knowledge encryption, which means that nobody at Mega can see your content, so they basically don’t know that you share and keep on your Mega account. Encryption-wise, here we have a 128-bit AES encryption, which isn’t strong as 256-bit, but it’s still uncrackable, and I doubt it will ever be.

TLS Encryption is in charge of traffic protection, and there is a feature where you can check the last 250 connection to your account, to check if anything looks strange, or if there are log-ins from another country or city.

Verdict

To wrap it up, Mega is a great cloud service, and definitely one of the most unique, because of a great encryption system, chat feature and great subscription plans. I know that it isn’t the fastest cloud service out there, but it offers a very reliable connection, uploads, and downloads. On top of that, nobody will know what you have uploaded to your Mega account, so the privacy is on the maximum level.

Go to Mega Cloud Storage