Cloud storage for small business, when the files are the business

A personal cloud drive is designed around one person keeping one library in sync across their own machines, and it is very good at that. A business asks for more than sync: several people working on the same material without treading on each other, work leaving the building to be looked at by someone outside the company, a decision being made and then still being findable a year later, and an owner who can say who can reach what. Those are the parts that fray first, and they fray in the gaps between tools — the shoot in one place, the notes in an email, the approval in a text message nobody thought to keep.

Spaces gathers those moments back into one place. The files live here, the comments live on the files, the approvals live where you can find them later, and the link you send a client carries its own record of whether it landed.

Where generic storage tends to strain is the size of the work. Uploads in Spaces are chunked and resumable, so a multi-gigabyte film survives a flaky connection without starting from the beginning, and a whole shoot climbs in the background while you carry on working — even on another page. You can drag a nested folder tree straight in from the desktop and the structure is kept exactly as it was, which is what makes moving an existing library across a background task instead of an afternoon spent watching a progress bar.

Formats are treated as first-class: a CR3 or an ARW previews in the browser like any JPEG, film plays in a proper player, SVGs and vectors preview in place, and there’s no format allow-list, so WAVs, stems and project bundles sit alongside everything else. For photographers, Lightroom Classic and Capture One hand their selects straight into an Area at full resolution, subfolders and all, with nothing to drag and nothing to upload twice — the full case is set out in cloud storage for photographers.

This is where the workflow scenarios in a small studio live. Say a production house has a cut waiting on a client’s notes: you send a link, it opens as a clean, branded page they can browse, play and download from with no account and no sign-up, and they leave a comment welded to the exact second they mean. Versions sit side by side so a fix reads as a fix, and a note can be marked resolved so the thread moves forward. On a photograph, the client draws straight onto the frame — a pin on the light through the window, a box around a crop — and the note remembers where it was left. On a mix, the real file streams losslessly, and the reply can be a held-button voice note pinned to the bar.

Before any of that, if the shortlist has to be settled internally, a set can go in front of the team and everyone votes on their own screen, anonymously, so the room’s real preference surfaces instead of the loudest voice in it. Close the round and the winners are tagged, gathered and ready to send.

When it’s working, the morning after a delivery is one screen instead of an email you don’t want to write: opened two hours ago, five downloads, one note on frame four. No thread to reconstruct, no asking the client whether the transfer landed, and the sign-off is sitting on the file it belongs to.

Access follows the way a small business delegates: clients see what they were sent, freelancers see what they were brought on for, account leads see everything, and an Area can be sealed to its owner alone when the work isn’t for the room. For a campaign under embargo, a share can be locked to a named list of people who prove their email once — the client portal page sets out how that works. Every move, share and deletion leaves a trail you can read back; anything deleted is recoverable for thirty days.

Your files live in a data centre in Amsterdam, and the region is pinned deliberately. The intelligence that makes them searchable runs on open models we host and run ourselves; nothing you upload trains a model, ours or anyone’s. There is a Data Processing Agreement in place, and the whole picture is on the security page.

If the drive you’re weighing has a name, we’ve written those comparisons in full — Dropbox and Google Drive, each with the switching path.