China’s answer to Google is offering 2TB cloud storage for free, but there’s a catch

Baidu, one of China’s biggest tech companies, introduced a 2TB free cloud storage plan for domestic users nearly a decade ago, and is now looking to do the same for the rest of the world with its Terabox brand. 

The company recently announced it is rolling out a referral program which extends its already humongous 1TB (1024GB) free cloud storage offer to a maximum of 3TB.

How useful this freebie might be is debatable given that the extra 2TB free cloud storage is only valid for 180 days. Although there’s no fixed expiration date, we’d expect the data to be purged once the 181st day is reached. Every activated referral brings in 200GB data and each existing Terabox user can add up to 10 users.

A decent performer

Such schemes have been around for cloud storage for years especially at the very beginning when cloud storage was nascent. Box, Dropbox and Onedrive have recruited millions of active users using this tried and tested method. 

Also available is a check-in program which gives 293GB of data after a week; Terabox didn’t say whether both programs can run concurrently to boost cloud storage capacity.

We reviewed Terabox recently and found that while there are tradeoffs to be had in terms of bandwidth throttling and file size limits, these are all reasonable compromises to make, so we gave it an honorable 3.5/5 stars. There’s no native MacOS client and the fact that the servers are located in mainland China may make some potential users uneasy. 

Terabox has been a roaring success outside of China though with more than 35 million downloads on PC, iOS and Android. The firm has confirmed that it reserves the right to deny the referral program reward(s) in the event of fraud or other excluded circumstances.

As a comparison, our current best cloud storage provider, iDrive (opens in new tab), charges only $3.98 for the first year and delivers 10TB online cloud storage with support for unlimited devices and extensive file versioning. After the first year though, you will be charged nearly $80.