Google Will Make Its Paid Storage Plans Cheaper (theverge.com) 69
An anonymous reader shares a report:Google is rolling out new changes to its storage plans that include a new, low-cost storage plan and half off the price of its 2TB storage option, the company announced today. It's also converting all Google Drive paid storage plans to Google One, perhaps in part because you'll now have one-tap access to Google's live customer service.
Google One will get a new $2.99 a month option that gets you 200GB of storage. The 2TB plan, which usually costs $19.99 per month, will now cost $9.99 a month. Finally, the 1TB plan that costs $9.99 a month is getting removed. The other plans for 10, 20, or 30TB won't see any changes.
Google One will get a new $2.99 a month option that gets you 200GB of storage. The 2TB plan, which usually costs $19.99 per month, will now cost $9.99 a month. Finally, the 1TB plan that costs $9.99 a month is getting removed. The other plans for 10, 20, or 30TB won't see any changes.
Cheaper? Just trying to be relevant (Score:3)
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I'm using Backblaze B2 for my local data backup and sync, but at the same time I am using Google's Docs, Sheets and mail with some attachments. I am currently using 13 GB out of 15 and I'm considering upgrading to the next tier.
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backblaze b2 and wasabi.com
They really are different products, but this price is now inline with wasabi.com and better than B2.
Give us tour data (Score:5, Interesting)
We'll make it cheaper for you to be spied on
It's the "per month" thing that gets me. (Score:5, Insightful)
If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.
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You can pay yearly.
Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me. (Score:4, Interesting)
Many years ago before the term "cloud" was a buzz word I used my home Internet connection combined with Webmin and Usermin to have my own, easy to use, remote storage. This was before USB flash drives were even a thing.
If it weren't for the fact ISP's tend to like to combat home hosting through port blocking these days (even if I do know how to get around it), I think I would be doing that again. I'm about to get a new ISP, we'll see.
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That's good, Comcast is who I'm about to go with and AT&T is the other option at the new place.
I just moved out of an area where Suddenlink had a regional monopoly and they blocked the shit out of everything. A buddy of mine, also in that area, and myself on occasion, would light them up on Twitter and other forums about their data caps. High level people in the company would actually have to do damage control after the two of us busted out our geek skills explaining how their low datacaps were bogus
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Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me. (Score:5, Insightful)
The counter argument is that it isn't JUST storage though. Add in the power and maintenance costs. Add in the data redundancy/resiliency. Add in the ability to easily share the content stored on GDrive with others. If you only look at the cost from just a raw storage standpoint, yes local storage is cheaper. But as soon as your single drive dies, you lose everything. GDrive, AWS S3, BackBlaze, etc all use redundant storage with file chunks spread across multiple disks in multiple servers across multiple full racks. Now, if that isn't worth something to you, that's perfectly fine and you're more than welcome to purchase your own local storage. But if you care are off-site copies of content stored in a redundant fashion, these services are great.
As an FYI, one of my tasks was to help rebuild a business after they had a 100% total loss of all local computer and server systems after a fire destroyed their building. Using one of these "expensive" cloud providers, I was able to simply have them purchase a new server, log into their cloud account, and re-sync all of their content. Their new servers were already up and running long before they even had the office rebuilt and occupied. In this particular instance, remote storage was invaluable to the business.
Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me. (Score:4, Insightful)
I formerly used a second hard drive as my sole backup. Lightning hit nearby and took out both hard drives - luckily between the two hard drives I was able to recover most of the files.
A second incident took out both hard drives when a mount failed and the top drive fell on to the lower drive.
You can dismiss me as a moron, or you can use my hard-won experience - no skin off my back. The point is now I make sure I have a backup at a separate geographic location, and now I understand why that is considered best practice.
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If your data is valuable then that would be a good argument. But if your data is valuable would you trust Google with it?
Just do a nightly incremental off-site backup to the IT Director's basement. If you can't trust him/her with the data then you're already screwed.
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$10 a month is $120 per year. Since hard drive storage only costs about $25 per TB to actually buy one of those 2 TB, 3 TB, or bigger drives, they break even on the storage costs at about 5 months.
You mean 12 months. A 2TB drive costs $60, but since you aren't an idiot you don't buy just one, you buy two because you need one copy offsite. So you back up locally to one of them, then periodically run over to your mom's house (or wherever you're storing your offsite copy) and swap them. I'm assuming you don't need to include any allowance for your time because you're good and visit your mom regularly anyway. And I'm assuming you are methodical and not lazy and so always remember to do this drive swapp
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I used to use this approach. I had two external hard drives with all of my data backed up on them. I'd take one drive and store it at my in-laws' house in case something (fire, theft) happened at my house. In theory, this system was great. The plan was that I'd regularly take the hard drive home, back everything up, and then take it back to my in-laws' house. The reality, though, was that I'd forget to back up for months at a time or would back up to the local hard drive and not to the remote one.
Now, I use
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I get 1TB 'free' with my google fiber account. Wonder if it is getting the upgrade too? I'm not holding my breath, but you never know. Use it to move somewhat large audio files to clients.
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In this specific scenario, you aren't paying for disk space, you are paying for them to have responsibility for keeping the data available, and having it at a persistently accessible location. That means some chunk of electricity, network connectivity, and costs associated with replacing storage capacity, and various other requirements. In terms of paying for a decade, these providers are uncomfortable with the commitment of the service being available as the customer would like it more than a year out or
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I've been playing with. Syncthing [syncthing.net]. I'm seriously thinking about using it to make an offsite backup, already my documents are synced between my laptop and desktop using it, I'm pretty sure it would work if I decided to "go big" with it.
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You are paying for ... GOOGLE ... responsibility ... ha ... haha .... hehehe .... heHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHH
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Well, responsible for keeping the data available I said, did not necessarily suggest they will behave responsibly with the data, which is a bit different.
Of course on a whim they could decide they don't like being in the business and shut down, so I guess google has that challenge too (as do *all* the providers, always have to be ready to at least in theory start up your infrastructure elsewhere without notice).
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If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.
pCloud [pcloud.com] offers a "lifetime" cloud storage service for a one-time fee. Their definition of lifetime [pcloud.com] is the shorter of your lifetime or 99 years.
Disclaimer: I do not own, work for, or have any other financial interest in pCloud.
Re: It's the "per month" thing that gets me. (Score:2)
You really believe they will still be in business 5 years from now, let alone 99 years?
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You really believe they will still be in business 5 years from now, let alone 99 years?
My point was that there are alternatives to cloud services that have a monthly or annual charge that never ends. As you point out, there are potential risks with these options.
Fundamentally, the risk that the cloud service provider stops providing the service you are using is a risk of any cloud service. The only way to completely prevent someone else's bad business decisions from affecting your data is to keep your data on servers you own that are located on property you own. Of course, you must have fu
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Maybe, maybe not.
This could totally work, especially if they pull the grandfather clause.
How many businesses have you seen start up with a reasonable deal like this (and right now it's on "sale"), then raise the price, then stop offering this to new subscribers but leaving the old guys grandfathered in? A company like this has a good chance of gaining traction if enough people like me get on-board at first. Once a critical mass of popularity happens, then they can turn into jerks, and as long as they don'
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Another note:
In 10 years how significant will 2 TB of storage be? Per this chart [wikipedia.org] the first 1.5 TB drive came out ten years ago. That was the huge drive most of us couldn't afford, many of us were running 500 GB drives (and a lot of laptop users still are). Already you could hold five 2TB accounts on a single HDD (not counting backups and everything) and that's not even the biggest drive available. How many accounts could you hold on a single drive in ten years? 20? In 30 years they'll be giggling abou
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If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.
You're right, it's actually horribly overpriced if you do the math. What they should charge for is bandwidth, since the storage is pennies, it's transferring 2tb daily that would rack up some bills. They could charge 99 cents a month for 2tb storage and still make a killing because it's not really 2tb, most people just outgrew 200mb but haven't reached anywhere near 2tb yet.
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I could totally get on board with this. An up-front costs for the space and then may $0.10 per GB of transfer after the first month. I could rsync everything up daily, once a week, whatever, keep my bandwidth down, while continuing to make use of my space.
Considering the source (Score:1)
Shouldn't it be storage where you, the user, get paid? The more you use, the more you earn. After all, chances are it's all being data mined to fuel their AI algorithms and targeted advertising.
Does paying avoid file censorship? (Score:1)
It wasn't that long ago that files on Google Drive were disappearing if they had naughty filenames.
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Welcome to the world where you give a company access to your data. One day they decide they don't like that kind of data and, unlike free speech in public places, they have no obligation to allow you to have/use/save that kind of data.
BYOK (bring your own key) is the solution, but very few support it and it's almost exclusively aimed at enterprise. MS Office supports it if you want to run your own KMS...granted if that gets hosed you lose everything. And since MS does your backups (well, replication ther
Possession is nine points of the law and valuable (Score:2)
The price cuts might be driven by competition, which would be okay, or by Moore's Law and its corollaries, which would be even better, but I think this pricing probably reflects a fundamental reappraisal of the value of possessing your data. Once they have their hands on your data, you are the one with the burden of getting it away from them--and you can never be certain that they didn't retain a copy. There might even be incentivizing from the actual legal authorities to make their own work easier. After a
Re: Possession is nine points of the law and valua (Score:2)
Actually, you CAN be certain they DID retain a copy of your data. Big Brother Google never forgets.
Next stop ... G Suite? (Score:3)
It would be nice if they looked at their G Suite pricing for people who simply want a couple of email addresses hanging from their own domain. Right now, if you have your own domain, Google assumes you're a business and charges accordingly.
Here in the UK 3.30 GBP/user/month comes to near 198 GBP (~$270) per year for 5 family members which is extremely expensive! Even more so when you realise that, because it's family, all you really want is the same functionality that normal Gmail users get.
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Go read the G-Suite T&Cs. They are not the same as the consumer Gmail product.
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I can't use google music. My daughter can't use the google assistant on her phone, because I have history and spying stuff turned off as much as possible.
It is easy to share calendars and documents, although that's probably easy enough with normal gmail. I can reset passwords for any of the accounts, and do afew other things, like assign aliases within the domain.
For example, I usually assign child@domain.com to mother@domain.com un
Re: Next stop ... G Suite? (Score:2)
Also free G-suite T&C's are different from paid/enterprise
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Yeah, me too.
However I lost the original domain (due to an issue out of my control) and the legacy version won't allow you to change your primary domain to a new one. You have to create a new alias, set that to the primary and then reconfigure all users to send their email through an external SMTP server (which is actually Google's own SMTP server) so you can avoid Outlook telling everyone your old (non-working) address.
Frankly it's a mess.
In addition also have issues in that some people aren't receiving my
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Yeah, their pricing is awful for groups or families.
The real story (Score:2)
Re: The real story (Score:1)
So basically Google just matched Apple's pricing? (Score:1)
Google's 1TB plan ($9.99) was the same cost of Apple's iCloud Drive 2TB plan. So now Google and Apple are the same, except Apple has the small 50GB option for $0.99.
50GB: $0.99
200GB: $2.99
2TB: $9.99
Why would anyone pay google (Score:1)
To spy on them??!!
What's your time worth? (Score:2)
Others have pointed out the costs of doing it yourself (internet, software updates, electricity, offsite/multi-site availability, gmail integration, physical security (like when you're on vacation). Non-Disruptive (and risk free upgrades). And using an Enterprise grade platform to provide it. All of these are rolled into that $1.99/$2.99/whatever cost per month of gDrive. Is anybody doing this without Consumer grade components (all HW + SW + internet connectivity + utilities)?
However, what is your hourly
Here is an unpopular opinion: Cryptocurrency (Score:1)
Re: Here is an unpopular opinion: Cryptocurrency (Score:1)
Re: who pays GOOGLE prices ? (Score:1)
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Great! Build a storage service and sell it to us. See how far you get.