I've been using this for awhile now. I like it better than my Google Drive and my Dropbox.

Pros:

• Speed is reasonable.

• Buying more storage is really cheap.

• Nice referral program, your friends gain 1gb for being refereed, you gain 512mb for referring them. Dropbox only gives you 250mb. That's less than a pittance, may as well be snail mailing me 3.5 inch floppies.

• Easy to use, can even be mapped as a network drive in windows, folder and file sharing can be set and removed easy. I can link directly to a folder, and have my friend see the files inside rather than having to one by one share each file.

Cons:

• Low startup size. 10gb, which is 5gb less than Google Drive, MS One Drive, and several others.

• Your friends may repeatedly make KGB and or "in Russia" jokes anytime you say "it's on my yandex disk".

Other thoughts:

• The email service is pretty decent too. Comparable to Google in features, and loads fast.

• I don't see people mention the NSA every time I link to Google, so I don't think there is any merit in discussing weather or not the Russian government cares about your photo album or whatever else you store in your yandex.disk account.

• As cheap as physical storage is these days, I think all these services should crank up the storage size while dropping their price per GiB...Even 15gb isn't all that much these days, and they could be making more money off added value services connected to these storage spaces than they do milking you for extra space. As a matter of fact, several of these services talk about live online backups as a selling point when in fact most of them just act as a spare drive. A really small spare drive. They could be doing so much more with this, like diff'd backups on the server side (like an SVN or GIT repo built into your drive app). A few services do have something like that, but it is not common. It should be.

[Edited by Teo, October 23]

Why does this Russian government spy project have so high rating?

The developer formally provides an API for using cloud storage by third-party clients. But in fact, the company puts supporters clients in a deliberately disadvantageous position in relation to its own clients: neither the methods of multi-threaded data transfer, nor the use of caching servers are registered in the API. Both functions are implemented in the native application - at least 30 threads and comparison of uploaded files by hash sum. As a consequence, when using applications such as rclone, data transfer rates are often very slow due to single-threaded transfers or throttling for exceeding the allowed (even for a private key) number of requests.

• Competitive prices
• Quite good speed
• Pretty much the best windows and android client ive seen so far
• Reindexes the whole filesystem several times

But in the end of the day, you don't want Putin to laugh at your out of focus family pictures, sell all your data, and install extra applications without permission. After it installed a totally unknown picture viewing app, i've immediately deleted the whole thing. I've selected another bigbrother instead, in my case: Google.

What do you think about Yandex.Disk?

I think Yandex.DISK it's a Russian government project for collecting, analyzing, and using their users and their data as a resource for their own goals.

What do you need to know about Yandex.Disk in a few words?

• Yandex officially operated company by the Russian Government with direct access to all of your files from police and other local authorities.
• Yandex belongs to Sberbank (Russia), Sberbank, it's Russian national bank (belongs to the Russian Federation), which means Yandex belongs officially to Russia.
• Yandex is the most insecure storage that you can even find on the internet. Most insecure. Much more comfortable will be sending data directly to the police department, instead of them.
• You must know that a lot of people are already jailed for using "like & comment" functions in social networks and not only because of these services.

Let's talk about apps:

• they can corrupt your files. And this happened several times
• they have a limited upload limit up to 5gb per file or like that (even less). If you want to download more - you are forced to sign up with phone number confirmation.
• very frequently on their international page (or to be honest 90 times from 100), you will be asked to log in or manipulated to create an account on their service via different methods.
• On the international page, you can easy to see for international visitors Russian-based captcha. Yes, yes, Russian characters on the global site. And how visitors suppose to solve? You're right - impossible to solve it.
• Their phone apps automatically upload all data that you have to their services. If for some reason you have ANY of Yandex service on your phone, and the app authorized, that means ALL OTHER STAND-ALONE APPS BUT DEVELOPED BY YANDEX will automatically approved and will be able to do different stuff in the background, like uploading photos, or doing actions THAT NOT PERMITTED TO DO.
• Their services are blocked in several countries because of espionage. This is around ~70-110 million of people around the globe who can't access their services.
• Their data centers are located mostly in Russia, but some part of them in the EU. No servers in SEA or Americas regions. Speeds for downloading / uploading data from elsewhere outside the EU / Russia will be slow.

Very frequently, you will see technical issues on their side, but you will not be able to contact their support at all. They have automatic robotic forms, but the only way to reach their help it's a phone call. Where on the phone number, they will tell you to open a link with the robotic form, which will, as previously, do nothing for you to solve a problem. And this is a complete circle. So there is no support at all. If you are lost access or pass, be sure you forgot your account forever, even if you have recovery questions and answers.

=========================================

Summary: avoid Yandex, try anything else that you prefer. This is a serious company personally for you. How is it dangerous? This depends on who you're, what you are doing, and what files you plan to store on their buggy and crappy file storage.

Yandex.Disk is service ran by Yandex, a Russian version of home brewed Google alternative. You get a generous 10GB of free-storage. This is generous given how you only get 5GB with OneDrive or 15GB with Google Drive (the 15GB storage is total storage that counts your Photos and Email usage against storage quote).

For the sake of this review I will comparing Yandex.Disk to Google Drive as they are similar in nature and feature base.

Both Yandex.Disk and Google Drive share similar Sharing and Access policies. The UI of Yandex.Disk is very clean and I personally like it more then Google Drive. Like Google Drive you can also create Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations. Unlike Google, Yandex does not use a "custom" suite of Office applications. Instead you are given Microsoft "suite" of Office applications.

Essentially the office "suite" is the same once you can use at office.live.com or OneDrive. The preferences are up to the users, but I think Microsoft's Online Office suite is a much better option since Office is the better Office utility out there (this is personal view after testing a number of Office solutions).

Unlike Google, Yandex does not have Photos storage per say like Google Photos. Where Google Photos has it's own separate application and web application from Google Drive, Yandex does not. However, if you enable "Auto Upload" you can uploaded "Unlimited amount of Photos" to the Yandex.Disk. This Photos will appear along with all your other uploaded photos in Yandex.Disk, unfortunately there is no Camera Roll or Auto Upload folder, so viewing them will pull up "all" images you uploaded to Yandex.Disk, this is a pretty poor design flaw since such should have there own user accessible folder.

The other portion is that if you want to upload "videos" to "Unlimited" storage you will need to pay up. Google does not have such limitation with Photos, granted Videos still count against your storage quote but as long as you choose Reduced Quality you can upload all the photos you want.

Outside of that there aren't any major differences I can think off. Outside of Google Disk is ran by a US based company, Yandex.Disk is ran by Russia based company. That automatically apply's applicable local laws. You also have to understand that just as Google sharing your data with NSA, Yandex will do the same with Russians FSB (KGB) counterpart.

I am writing to Turkey. There is a rumor that the government has access to all of its data and uses it in accordance with its own interests.