Well, it’s not the mythical Google Drive, but it’s close. For a price. And assuming you only want to store pictures and emails.
Google tonight announced that it was drastically slashing prices while at the same time offering more storage pricing options for users of its services. Specifically, while Gmail users currently get about 7 gigabytes for free and Picasa users get about 1 gigabyte for free, both can now upgrade to 20 GB for just $5 a year. Previously, it cost $20 to get just 10 GB of additional service.
But what’s really pretty incredible is that Google has an option for you to buy up to 16 terabytes, yes, terabytes, of storage from them. As Google notes, that enough to store 8 million very high resolution photos. Considering that most consumers probably still have south of 500 gigabytes of storage in their home, that’s pretty massive.
Of course, you’ll pay for it: 16 TB will set you back $4,096 a year. But if you do something that requires you to store 16 TB of photos, you can probably afford that. And there are varying storage levels at different price points leading up to that. 8 TB is $2,048 a year, 4 TB is $1,024, and so forth.
These all represent significant price decreases from Google’s previous offerings, but it still would be cheaper to buy your own external drives. So why not do that? Well, Google offers the same levels of backup security that it ensures on all of its data currently. Plus, you won’t have to have dozens of drives sitting around. And since the data is all in the cloud, you’d be able to access it from anywhere, which Google highlights in its post.
But there’s something key to remember: Google is only officially offering this storage for use with Gmail and Picasa. It’s not a complete online backup/storage system, which is what Google Drive (or Gdrive) has long been rumored to be. Of course, there are programs and workarounds that will more or less let you use it for that purpose, but Google is not yet sanctioning the use of its storage as your official cloud drive.
Under Google’s system, 1 TB of storage will cost $256 a year and 400 GB is $100 a year. I don’t know about you, but if Apple offered something similar that would let me backup all my iTunes music and movies and allowed me to access them from anywhere, I would do it.
[photo: flickr/vsz]
Is there bandwidth limits on these packages? 16Tb is extreme…
google makes no note of any bandwidth limits. though it doesn’t seem like it would be much of a problem with email and photos. serving video on the other hand…
if you ordered 8 2TB drivers from NewEgg and a Hello Kitty cloud sticker, heck, order 2 cloud stickers….comes out cheaper
Picasa Web is also for hosting videos
Good question. I would consider it if it would be 20GB bandwidth per year, not disk space, since it tends to grow over time. I checked now and my photo collection is 25GB, while I am not that active photographer, after all. 80GB would be enough, but then, I can have 25GB with Microsoft Skydrive for free, or unlimited with Flickr for $25/year.
Exactly my thought – my current 7 GB limit for Gmail is plenty and I have unlimited storage with Flickr for $25. This price drop is meaningless to me.
Well I suppose bandwith limit has to to there.
Google have their own datacenters all over the world, that makes them not paying anything for youtube traffic for example as they sell their bandwith to other ISPs…
So i doubt there is a bandwidth limit on this, as they wont have a super huge amount of customers anyway
Brilliant! I’ve been looking for somewhere to store my 8 million images.
lol. the sarcasm is rife in this comment.
wait, do you really have 8 million pics?
i do such great work!
Its about time Google also starts offering webhosting services. Either free or for a nominal price such as this.
They’ve had Google Sites for a while which is free.
And you can trick out your own domain with Google Apps for $10 a year, which gives you custom gmail and drag-and-drop web building through Sites. By registering through them, your Sites pages are on your domain and not http://googlepa...finallyyourpage.
It’s not full web hosting, but it’s close and dirt cheap. You can embed a Google Checkout or Paypal shopping cart and have a e-commerce site hosted for $10/year!
I am actually referring to providing proper hosting with ftp access & MySQL. Google Sites is for beginners.
Check out Google App Engine.
not ftp and MySQL, but you can build Python or Java apps, and access their database (called BigTable) which is optimized for distributed delivery (unlike MySQL).
So yeah, they do web hosting for applications.
PS I’d hardly say that ftp access and MySQL are necessary for “proper hosting”. Consider that you may have a limited view or a particular requirement.
Google App Engine is for veterans.
You can do that with AppEngine and Sites.
Just combine it with the free version og Google Apps.
@Mathew I’ll use it to store my 800 million low resolution images!
So you use gmail to send it to the cloud? at what… 20 megs at a time or something? I’d love to throw everything in one file and send it — maybe 4 -10 gigs but… um… how again without the hassle of doing it small chunks at a time? Am I missing something?
For pics, you use Picasa. There’s a mass-upload tool in Picasa.
I second the last sentence of the article. If I could back up and/or free up space on my local hard drive, I’d be happy to pay a nominal fee.
doesn’t Flickr pro give u unlimited photo storage for 25$ per year?
unlimited is a marketing word, im sure you would get warned or maybe suspended if you actually uploaded 16tb
redoune youre wrong
proof?
Redouane should provide a proof.
Yes, but Flickr doesn’t offer very high resolution photo storage. If you want to store high res photos, SmugMug is a great option. Google’s cloud drive isn’t limited to photos.
It depends on what you mean by high resolution. Flickr allows one to store high enough resolution photos to print off poster sized prints. That works for 99.8% of photographers.
What is cool about this price drops is that they upgraded my storage capacity commensurate with the price that I just renewed at this year: $20. I went from 10GB to 80GB overnight.
I agree, MG. I would pay to store my 23,000+ tracks on their cloud service. If they incorporate their mp3 player seen in Gmail…even better.
Give the RIAA a call. I’m sure they can help you find a place to store your 23,000+ tracks.
Up the RIAA’s ass?
its a gmail limit, not a drive. theres a limit per message that is small.
windows live skydrive > “mythical” non-existant google drive
Skydrive has no FTP access and is limited to 50MB per file. How is it any better?
They are likely limiting it to email and photos now because those are relatively static items that you will not want to frequently upload, download, or share in their full resolution. You can share and enjoy pictures in their compressed form so the bandwidth issue isn’t a big deal… (unless ISPs get their way and put limit on your monthly upload/download quota).
yep, all true.
Not bad. For now 25GB for free on Skydrive does for me but that’ll change one day. Good on them for getting into this space.
It’s good to see large scale cloud storage being driven down but its another example of what Google can afford to do. With this move they should attract many more customers which will help pay for itself. It will be interesing to see how much it costs by the end of 2011. I would say it comes down another 25%
That’s a really important message to almost everybody in the Cloud Storage sector : Google is coming and they will not survive…
0.25$ per GB per Year that’s 7 times less expensive than Amazon (without bandwith fees) and 100 times less expensive than Box.net…
That’s pretty impressive, are they just making any profit on it?
Too bad if Apple offered this, it would be $4,096 per TB because it will be “storage built from the ground up with saving media files in mind” with features such as “ability to save music, tv shows, pictures and movies”, “automatic backups” and “search your library from any computer”. You know, premium stuff.
Don’t worry I’m typing this on my Macbook.
You know, Lala backs up all your music in the cloud for free. So your iTunes need is at least partly solved
i’m actually more concerned about my itunes movies. i have my music on my iphone anyway.
The price is bit high. Google must release some better plans at low cost.
I still think Google has a lon way to go. $256 per TB per year is 8x more than the current price of buing a TB hard drive on the open market and using it for 2 years. 16x more expensive if you consider that a hard drive should work fine for 4 years at least.
Google needs to implement fully cold cloud storage. If I want to upload a TB of my personal stuff to Google cloud storage, and that I very rarely need to access that data, Google should store 2 copies at 2 separate locations (if one hard disk fails), but then Google should also be able to turn off the power to the hard drives to 0 power consumption, and the only charge for power usage to resume turning on the hard drives on demand and charge for that power consumption as part of the bandwidth costs, cheaper than $0.01 per GB transfered from and to the cloud storage.
Then for the hosting of popular files, Google would automatically host those on more expensive always on hard drive storage, though the extra bandwidth usage should pay for most of that.
For (mostly pirated) popular video and audio files, Google should do like Streamload once did, only host one copy for all the users who “beamed” it instantly to their accounts. Thus if you want cloud storage for movie and music files that in average more than 1000 other Google cloud storage users are using, th cost for that TB of cloud storage should be less than 1/1000th the TB storage cost per year, thus $0.25 per TB per year, thus free unlimited cloud storage for popular files, financed by advertising. But Google probably needs to figure out some copyright issues before this happens.
For example, if I want 1TB on Google cloud storage today, Google should let me buy about 2x 1TB drives on the open market, at about $80 per hard drive at current hard drive pricing, and have them instantly connected to the Google cloud storage. Thus the pricing should be $80 per TB per hosted unique files per year. And $0.01 or less per GB transfered which includes power consumption costs (could depend also on the bitrate and the sustained transfer rates, bandwith to transfer many small files slowly would cost more than transfering the files quickly).
> should also be able to turn off the power to the hard drives
Great idea!
Take a look at Diomede Storage: http://www.diomedestorage.com
With Diomede, you can specify the number of copies you’d like replicated (not always 2 as you suggest).
-Steve
Internet ..is for porn
Or, use http://www.binfire.com, store as much as you want and pay $0 !
“if Apple offered something similar that would let me backup all my iTunes music and movies and allowed me to access them form anywhere, I would do it.”
Apple would not do it because the record labels would be angry. Sadly, it seems that it is going to take the next decade of red ink in their books for them to come to their senses.
At this time 7 GB enoung for me since I never store any image or data on Online storage
sold !!! Just got myself 20 GB.
Although, there are alternatives like skydrive and fliker, I dont want to ditch picasa desktop.
Perfect bkp.
Might this offering simply be the pre-cursor to Chrome OS?
Doesn’t MobileMe offer a very similar service to the one you describe at the end of your article?
>… if Apple offered something similar that would let me backup all my iTunes music and movies and allowed me to access them form anywhere, I would do it.
No you wouldn’t – because you already can but you decline to. It’s called “Napster.” What the heck is the difference between paying to keep a private copy of your song in the cloud vs paying to have access to central copy anytime, anywhere, you want?
I once started uploading mp3 files into Skydrive, but quickly deleted all of them, just in case the RIAA won some kind of court injunction to investigate all mp3 files (!). And I don’t even live in the US.
You could use Mozy (mozy.com) or a similar service for backup. $4.95/month for an unlimited capacity of off-site backup. I currently have 300 GB+ from just one of my systems backed up in this fashion. It works great.
I hope you didn’t use a private key when you did that backup. If you reinstall your OS and want to want to continue monitoring the exact same files, you have to reupload all of your data, even if you try to reuse your key. I was a happy Mozy user until this limitation bit me.
yeah, I used mozy until I realized it was terribly unreliable. Backblaze, however, has been a dream. I pay $50 per year and I have about 1 TB uploaded to them. So who the hell would pay $500 per year when you can use backblaze and pay 1/10th of that?
This seems to be a market with a lot of options. My company uses egnyte and I think its great.
http://www.egnyte.com
I note that if you want to store everything anyone has ever said, Google will rent you the space (10 exabytes) for only $2.5 billion dollars per year! http://go-to-he...es-and-j-k.html
Why not use one of the below
http://accessor...&lid=628335
Excellent drive, allows access to your files from anywhere, you can have two drives – 1 for usage and another one as a backup drive. Stores your music/video/photos or anything you like..
Unless I have access money to throw away, I would not spend money on Google/Apple product for backup.
I agree with Charbax; the pricing on this is WAY too high for back-up purposes; especially when compared the price of current hard drives.
Agree, but I think there must be a factor of convenience in there as well. If it’s tied to all your Google items anyways, you’ll probably just be like “meh, alright”
I’d get my own setup for now, but that might change if I actually had that kind of data to transfer/store.
I agree but I think the appeal of this is for professional users who plan on sharing the contents of their cloud drive, more than to simply provide an off-site backup solution.
Does anyone know if this will work with Apps for My Domain? Or am I regulated to buying premier?
That should be relegated. Man its still early.
Well, you could get the same from http://www.jungledrive.com. If you choose the RackSpace Cloud option, you get a gig of online storage for 15 cents a month. Ofcourse, the price is higher here, but you get full Sync folders, Offsite Backup of exactly what folders you need PLUS a “drive in the sky”.
And it’s multiplatform (works on Windows, Mac and Linux, AFAIK).
I meant http://www.jungledisk.com, of course. /facepalm.
Interesting. Amazon S3 would be roughly twice that. I like the competition.
Google offers 1TB for $256 a year.
That is $20 a month.
Or 2c per GB a month VS 15c by Amazon and no separate charging for bandwidth.
Now the question is can you use this?
With a 256Kbit upload is a 32*86400*365 = 962GB a year, which is totally thoretical! In practice you will be able to upload only a fraction of this (10-20%). which gets you beck to the Amazon price. But also you are committed for a quota and not pay per GB you upload. And this is the actual trick. You pay for a whole TB while on the first day you upload only 0.2 – 0.5GB. After a month you have 6 – 30GB that cost you $20 for 1TB. On the same time you pay only 45c to $2.25 on Amazon (you pay the monthly average) + $1 per GB upload. So the google trick is pretty dirty.
1) you pay for a quota you cannot use event at theoretical 100% use.
2) You pay for the entire quota day 1 and not as you go.
3) No easy refunds…
http://picasa.g...mp;answer=39567
Why would Google think users are stupid, I do not know.
Only a fool would buy it all immediately. From that same link, you can upgrade your space at any time. “You can upgrade storage plans for the pro-rated difference at any time. The Google storage you purchase is yours for the full year, at which time the plan will auto-renew based on your preference.”
Buy what you need, when you need it. Do they show that pricing? Sure. You may need it. But, if you buy it and don’t need it, then who’s stupid? The buyer? Or Google for offering it? I’d say the buyer is well informed.
Also, some of us have (or have access to) far faster connections than 256kbps.
Speaking of Mozy, use the following link to get 256 Mb more space on a free Mozy Home 2 Gb account:
https://mozy.com/?code=D685JF
Just use lala to access your music library from the cloud.
Egnyte is a better solution for this.
twitter account is @Egnyte
I agree with Jon. I use egnyte and its a great solution. Much better interface then mozy or carbonite and perfect for the SMB as well as big companies.
only for gmail and picasa? what a pointless service.
16TB is good for SMB … but for a single consumer? who the hell would want this? or need this?
thanks google, but i’ll just continue to buy my own web hosting for around $100/yr and store what ever files and formats i want.
I can buy 32 1-tb drives, a bunch of commodity mobos or san enclosures, and set them all up in raid for about the same price. This is useless and overpriced.
What happens when a fire burns up the 32 drives?
Not really necessary now. The GoogleDrive will come, and this is the predecessor.
Wow there are a lot of comments and a huge number of companies in this market. I think each company has a focus. Google is good for free google docs, box.net is okay for just sharing. Mozy and Carbonite seem to have a lot of problems. Egnyte is perfect for the SMB market. Sharepoint seems to be losing steam.