just had my pro account upgraded for free 🙂

http://mashable.com/2014/08/27/dropbox-pro-1-terabyte/

Also:

What’s new with Dropbox Pro?
• We’re giving you 10x the space — for the same price. You’ll have 1 TB of space for your photos, videos, docs, and any other files you want to keep safe in Dropbox.
• With new sharing controls, we’re making it easier to manage access to the stuff you share. You can set passwords and expiration dates on your shared links and grant view-only access to shared folders.
• Keeping your stuff safe is our top priority. For extra peace of mind, remote wipe lets you delete your Dropbox files off a lost or stolen device.

I can’t quite get used to the idea of renting storage space just yet especially when HDD are so cheap, although it seems to be the way things are going. I use my Google / MS free storage space (i think I have about 30mb between them) a lot but it’s usually for transient data, so I can work between machines, but to pay nearly £100 / year, even for 1TB seems a lot of money.

I was thinking of creating my own cloud with a meaty NAS drive though – probably not as secure though.

You can get hosting with unlimited storage cheaper than that plus the advantages email and web hosting.

Drobox is very slick though, I use it to continually back up my work laptop and share large files etc.

For backup purposes, Backblaze is half that price, unlimited and nicely automated. You can still use the free Dropbox space for sharing large files.

to pay nearly £100 / year, even for 1TB seems a lot of money.

Agreed. A decent 1TB HDD will cost you the princely sum of £40, and it means all of your data is stored locally. I still feel uneasy about giving all my data to a faceless third party to look after.

Use dropbox a lot and love it but don’t need anything like 1TB cloud storage. Would happily pay smaller amount for a smaller allowance.

If you have a large hard drive, want to sync your files but don’t want to pay for it or host them externally, Bit Torrent Sync is right up your street.

Here’s an explanation of what it does
Should I use bittorrent sync instead of dropbox

and it means all of your data is stored locally

isn’t the point of dropbox and other cloud storage services precisely to avoid only storing all your data locally?

There’s no reason why you can’t back up to an encrypted local folder that mirrors to Dropbox. It’s no less secure but if your house burns down/all your kit gets stolen you can recover from it.