Transfercloud review – Should I join the blue wave?
It is my pleasure to bring a fresh look on Transfercloud in a task of reviewing its features. Please, follow me on a journey through the Transfercloud service.
TransferCloud Overview
My greetings with Transfercloud is a look at the picture of their server room. It’s the biggest thing on their main page. The best feature of this service is synchronization with personal clouds. And almost all private clouds like Google Drive or One Drive are supported. The registration is quite simple, and you can use your free plan in a few minutes. The design is pleasing for the eye with only small issues on a few mobile devices like Blackberry Playbook. I like how airy this service feels. The graphic is good until you open a file. The free trial is for one week, where you can play with all the features. The download speed is slightly below average. You also need to know that the only limitation for free users is the bandwidth of size 1 GB. The fetching is an average in the torrent downloader market.
| Best Alternatives |
|
Check Review | Visit | |
|
Check Review | Visit | |
|
Check Review | Visit |
Their storage is average by its looks and overall features. However, they worked great on making their download list easy to use. It is clear, and finding your files is very easy.
The thing that surprises me is cryptocurrency mining. You can use your device CPU to mine “credits”, that you use to purchase an upgrade to your plans. I will address it in one of the paragraphs of this review.
A weird thing that sometimes happens is, that if you click the Terms (with logged in account), you log out. This issue happened to me a few times. It did not change my feeling while I was exploring the features.
Pros
+ cloud synchronisation
+ average fetching speed
+ download more than just torrents
Cons
– design of file browser
– lack of integrations
– download speed
– few clumsy bugs on main page
Speed
Firstly, we look at fetching a file. This part is the time when Transfercloud downloads your data on their site. I find their download speed average around 3MB per second at the peak. I tried a file with over 100 seeders, and one with 10 seeders to measure this speed.
Download speed is slightly below average. Most of the times, it is ok, but from Malaysia or Singapore, it is not so bearable. I know that this speed depends on the connection between my computer and their servers. However, it could be upgraded by local servers.
As part of download speed, I try downloading the non-torrent file. Trying to download a youtube video (that I uploaded for this test) lead me to the white screen without anything. After an around a minute, my file was downloaded for me, but it used a lot of my bandwidth, and for a free user, it could be a killing blow. But the download is almost instant. I was surprised after seeing the slight bellow average fetching speed to see a fast youtube video downloader, but it was quick. I also tried downloading the software through TrasferCloud, which was slow again, but still bearable for me as the end user.
Downloading with Transfercloud
Maybe you ask, how do you download any files with Transfercloud? You find a file that you want and insert a direct download link. After it, you wait for a couple of moments (depends on the file size), and after these few moments, you will have this file in your storage. I found out that one of the best tests is to download an entire webpage because it is slow enough to see the progress.
But I am not sure why would you use it when it is slower than downloading directly to your device. Maybe iPhone users have a reason for it, but otherwise, I don’t know how to use this tool. But I will keep in mind that the downloading options are wide in the conclusion part.
Storage and Service
The storage has some limits for its users. It is rather simplistic and lacks a few more advanced options like name edit, which would be lifesaving for OneDrive sync. The list of downloaded files is crystal clear, and I like, that you see all your download attempts rather than only your successful ones. You can see where it was downloaded to, the status of it, and most importantly, the size of your file.
However, in a few instances, I didn’t see how big my torrent file was and how much of my bandwidth it covers. Removing torrent from the list is a simple step, and after two clicks, your list can be empty. I never had more than 10 files on my account, but it would be lovely to have a search button. As I said before, the download list is great to use, and I stand with this claim, but also I can imagine cases, where you would enjoy having an option to search in your files. You find information about file lifetime. However, I was not able to find the exact time for which Transfercloud stores your file before deleting it.
Additional connectivity – share to other storages
The big pro of Transfercloud is their synchronization to all big cloud storages, which means that you don’t have to care about your Transfercloud storage. You can sync everything to your Google Drive, or any other cloud from the wide list, containing: Google Drive, One Drive, Open Drive, Dropbox, HiDrive and Yandex. Or, you can use their WebDAV server, FTP server or SFTP. You can also contact their team, and they will try to implement your another cloud to your account. However, right now, there are few issues with Mega.nz, pCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive. Mega has a limitation on the transfer size, which could be unpleasant to deal with. pCloud sometimes has small issues with its service. Lastly, Amazon Cloud Drive is now rejecting new cloud drive connection, but this can change.
I am personally surprised by the Dropbox and One Drive integrations. I know that Dropbox dumped another cloud torrent client in the past, and their API is prohibited to torrent downloaders. The One Drive currently runs a bot, who detects anything, that could violate any Author rights, and bans users for it. This problem could be prevented by a name change, which is unfortunately not supported by Transfercloud. You might try workaround by downloading a file to your computer and then to your One Drive or to another cloud, that has settings for editing your files.
Cryptomining
Cryptocurrencies are a new invention, which could be summed up as internet currency, that is decentralised, and all bank transfers are “secured” by its users. People who are called miners are paid by a part of the money, for using their computers to secure cash flow transaction between users. I know that this is a vague description of cryptos, but it is enough for this review.
The Transfercloud offers you to become one of these miners in their service. It is not possible to find out, which cryptocurrency you mine on their page. I am not satisfied with this fact because I don’t know how much money I am making, by using their Credit option.
The credit option of Transfercloud uses your computer computation power and via javascript program mines some currency, which is named a credit by Transfercloud. This process slows your computer down, and that is why you can change the speed of your mining to workaround it. A percentage represents this speed, but using below 80 % almost doesn’t make sense.
Random Cryptomining seems shady
But why do you even use this option? You can use your credits to pay for your premium plans. The 10 days of trial account cost 700 credits. I will focus now on it. The amount of credits you can mine in an hour is 12 (said by Transfercloud), which means that you would need to mine for little less than two and a half day. But for this, you would need an i7 processor and a lot of electrical energy. I used a midrange cost laptop with IntelCore i5 and mined 0,15 every five minutes on 100 % of mining speed. That is 1,8 credit every hour and more than 16 days to get 10 days of a trial account.
I don’t see this being a reliable source of your premium plan because to benefit from it, you would need a mining farm-like computer, and in that case, it is better to main other cryptos, and pay for your account.
But I can see this being used as a way of getting some free time, after intense mining. I don’t recommend using it as the main source of a premium plan, but as a secondary option, it seems great.
Premium plans
Transfercloud does have a few premium accounts. The first one is called Basic. With this plan, you can have 1 concurrent download, 2 queue slots, 5 GB storage/file size limit and unlimited bandwidth. You will pay $3.59 per month for this plan.
Then there is a plan called Premium, which will give you access to 5 concurrent downloads, 10 queue slots, up to 20 GB storage/file size limit and unlimited bandwidth. You would pay $8.99 per month if you chose this plan.
After this plan, let’s talk about his successor, the Power plan. The Power plan is packed with 10 concurrent downloads, unlimited queue slots and up to 50 GB storage/file size limit. This plan costs $14.39 per month.
These plans can be upgraded with different bonuses. One of them is Monster, which starts on the same price as Power plan, and which will access you another 5 concurrent downloads, 5 queue slots and 200 GB storage/file size limit.
Then there are file size limit/storage raisers, which allow you to have more cloud storage, and they stop your files from having an expiration date. You can upgrade to 500 GB or 1000 GB. The half terra plan costs an additional $5.95 to your premium plan cost, and the terra plan costs an additional $10.90.
Payment methods
All of these plans and additions can be purchased via credits which you can mine for Transfercloud. But a better way is to pay for them with your card, Paypal or Bank transfer. Their sites also accept Bitcoins, and other cryptos such as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, ICONOMI, Monero, Gnosis, Dash, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Stellar/Lumens, Ripple, Ethereum Classic, Augur REP tokens, Melon, Zcash, Tether, and EOS are also accepted. I even found a few resellers options and tiny bits of information of life long subscription.
Free plan
Free users have 7 days to try all the features, and they are limited by 3GB per file and 1 GB bandwidth. You can always try them. However, the free account is just too limited to function correctly in longer-term.
Features
The main feature is synchronisation to your clouds. There are no more extra features like streaming, API or browser extension.
| Best Alternatives |
|
|
Check Review | Visit | |
|
|
Check Review | Visit | |
|
|
Check Review | Visit |
Conclusion
Transfercloud is meant to download your files, and send them immediately away to a different cloud. That is his biggest strength and biggest weakness. Their fetching speed is average, and in few cases even above average, however, the download speed is below average, and in few instances unbearable. With all pieces of information I gathered about downloading, I rate it with three out of five stars, which is great average speed.
Another rating goes for storage and service. While on the one hand, I like the cloudy design and blue-ish colours, on the other hand, I don’t like the actual storage interface, which is lazily done. If I added the lack of external features, I would rate Transfercloud with two out of five. However, I need to take in count the crypto mining experience and cloud synchronisation. That is, why I rate them three out of five.
The last look is on security. Their Privacy terms allow us to see, that Transfercloud only stores data about their users, when it is needed and when you request synchronisation between clouds. There is no data encryption, nor antivirus check, which is why they are getting an average score of three out of five.
Is Transfercloud recommended?
It is an average torrent downloader which excels in cloud synchronisation, however, lacks other features that would improve it significantly. If you want to download your torrent and you want to do nothing with it, then I can imagine myself recommending you Transfercloud.
Transfercloud gained its recommendation thanks to cloud synchronisation. It has gotten 9 stars from 15.
The main pros:
+ Cloud synchronization
+ crypto mining
+ download all kinds of files, not only torrents
If I look on Transfercloud in comparison with other torrent downloaders, its an average downloader but bellow average cloud storage. With their trial for all free users, you can try them for one week.