Google Rolls Out Online Storage Services

An anonymous reader writes "The associated press reports that Google is slated to provide online storage at a price. From the article: 'Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, targeted for users with large picture, music or video file collections. The prices range from $20 per year for 6 gigabytes of online storage; $75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage.' Is this too expensive for what there offering, or are you going to make use of it?"

Comments

Yes, it's too expensive

[heinousjay]

Well, that about does it for comments here.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[thornomad]

Apple's .Mac gives you 10GB for $99 per year -- and I think there are quite a few people who have signed on (mostly because it says "Mac" somewhere in the URL) despite the high price and poor service (IMO). I think the same will happen with Google (with or without the poor service).

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[aliquis]

Well, except backup storage which are easy to use it offers e-mail and jabber (i think) which isn't worth much, space for a blog, webpage, podcast, photo album, .. in a way which is easy to use. It also let you share your calendar info with others.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Its to late. Their already lots of comments. I assume there here to ad there inciteful comments. Don't loose your cool if they contain lots of grammer errors.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[stoolpigeon]

beautiful in a way that brings tears to my eyes. truly a work of art.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[gEvil (beta)]

Not to mention that they give you a free application or game every few months (or at least they used to). (And yes, I know it's not really "free").

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[akarnid]

When gems like this show up I cry aloud for my lack of mod points. I also think there in tent is to ad to teh discushion.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Blakey Rat]

That may or may not be a fair comparison. .Mac includes a lot of services other than just disk space, including a good amount of free software, easy-to-make photo albums and blogs, and some other things. Although, frankly, I think Google already offers almost all of what .Mac does.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[eclectic4]

Holy bejeesus, I can't believe you got modded up for that completely misleading comment. It's not $99 just for storage, it's also email, one-click publishing of web pages and photo pages. Groups. Automatic calander, bookmark, address book, email and some third party syncing. Easy Mac and PC (and Web) access to upload and download from anywhere, video tutorials, backup application, etc... the list is very long.

Check it out.

I use it every day and love it. I have found no better coupling than iLife and .Mac. It just works.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for you. I get all of that stuff for free from Google, and it just works, and I didn't have to pay any Apple taxes.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[thornomad]

True - but if you want to use it as an online storage medium it still costs $99 whether you use all that other stuff or not (which I did not). Also, I did not find it very "love-able" ... having the iDisk enabled significantly slowed down my Open/Save dialog boxes from many programs (requiring strange workarounds to remedy). I gave it up for an rsync account which I find more pleasing to the touch.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, no. It uses WebDAV. You can access it from any OS that supports WebDAV.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[bakura121]

I've got .Mac. I really like it, and even more now that they've beefed up the storage and services. But I do think that it's still a bit overpriced. If they dropped the price down to at least $79 (same price as their iLife and iWork products) then I think that would be much more reasonable. Amazon.com sells it for $79 so I'm happy.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[MrNaz]

Fanboy vs Fanboy.
Wasn't there a game called something similar in the old days of yore?

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[aliquis]

Didn't know that, what kind of apps/games?

Isn't all software free anyway? ;D

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no client software. The mail is IMAP or POP3. The storage is WebDAV.

Apple has used open standards for pretty much everything for about seven years, now. Ever since they started basing their OS on BSD and their services on open-source projects. iPod uses a "closed" database to handle music because it's meant to be a scalable appliance rather than something you have to maintain.

Every computer they have sold in the last year has been based on Intel processors with EFI (standard) booting them. Before that, they used PowerPC with OpenFirmware (yet another open standard! what are the odds?) to boot. Their designs were mostly right out of the PowerPC CHRP documents.

In summation, you don't know what you're talking about and you would be advised to learn before spouting off in the future.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[kestasjk]

Holy bejeesus, I can't believe you got modded up for that completely misleading comment. It's not $99 just for storage, it's also email storage, one-click storage of web pages and photo pages. Groups. Automatic calander storage, bookmark storage, address book storage, email storage (didn't you already mention this?) and some third party data storage. Easy Mac and PC (and Web) access to upload and download from anywhere (Eee.. storage?), video tutorials(Google's web apps also come with these), backup application(a storage interface?), etc... the list (of file types you can store) is very long.

Check it out.

I use it every day and love it. I have found no better coupling than iLife and .Mac. It just works. The stuff you mentioned is basically just.. storage. You also mention calendars, web hosting, and e-mail. Google does all that too, of course. Except it does that part for free.

Last I checked Google just works, and I expect this will just work too, and it looks like it'll just work for less money.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[thatotherguy007]

Do you work for apple?

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Dragonslicer]

Its to late. Their already lots of comments. I assume there here to ad there inciteful comments. Don't loose you're cool if they contain alot of grammer errors. Fixed that for ya.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[kavehkh]

Why do I keep seeing comments that have nothing to add to the article, on top of all others? If I could, I'd eat the moderation system and instead randomly spit out comments [selected uniformly]. That could be more informative, funny, and insightful in the long run. For the dessert of course, I would eat the karma points...and that's just after I've had digg for lunch.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is more then a little short on description of the service and didn't provide any sources. They could have made it up for all I know.

If there was more information then I could compare it to Amazons S3 service. By rough calculation the prices in TFA are about the same as Amazons service when you factor in the cost of transfer as well as storage.

BTW: I think EC2 and S3 are wicked cool. :)

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess all you need for Slashdot to be perfect is for it to represent your tastes exactly.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[KDan]

The crusades?..

Daniel

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Only when he is not busy blowJobbing

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[igre]

I also think this is too expensive especially if you take a look at today's hard drive prices. And also why would anybody want to pay for 6 gigs if you can have two 3-gigs gmail accounts for free?

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[eclectic4]

"The stuff you mentioned is basically just.. storage. You also mention calendars, web hosting, and e-mail. Google does all that too, of course. Except it does that part for free.

Last I checked Google just works, and I expect this will just work too, and it looks like it'll just work for less money.

Again, can't believe you were modded up for that... it's as if you "skipped" the rest that .Mac does, just like the parent did. Does it do those things like upload web pages with one click via apps like iLife (this is the big one... seems to be missing from your post)? I can have a brand new web page up in under 3 minutes, beautifully designed, with slideshows and video. Yes, in under 3 minutes, with all of my media at my fingertips. Will it give you video tutorials on how to use those applications? Does it sync bookmarks, passwords (keychain), third party applications? Does it give you a backup application that works with it too? Did you go to the link and see these things? Does it do one click gallery posting right from your photo or video applications (in this case iPhoto) nicely designed, without know ONE thing about the internets? Groups, iCards, Calendar publishing and synching, etc... all in one place, with one click.

No it doesn't, of course. If you are a strapped for cash, web tech geek with nothing but time to spend, then sure, use Google... but for the "rest" of the world (90% of us), that just wants it to work without knowing anything about how it works (my mother certainly does not want to learn HTML or anything about web hosting, that's for sure...), then this is by far, the best around. Period, and it's worth every penny.

Re:Yes, it's too expensive

[scottwnelson]

It does seem pricey considering everything else they do for free. After a few other big operations start adding the same service, prices will come down. I'm guessing they mine your data as well?

Old new: It's called gmail

[Bomarc]

See: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Re:Old new: It's called gmail

[dj_tla]

Yeah, that's actually what the storage is for. From the article:

"the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's office applications."

Gmail users can purchase it by going to Settings (top right of the gmail interface), then Accounts, then check out the new "Add additional storage" row. Or, you can just straight to https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage

Not quite GDrive, or even S3...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's cheaper than Amazon's S3 once you factor in bandwidth, but all this really is is supplemental storage for GMail and Picasa. You'd need something hackish like GMail Drive to use it for anything more. Give me FTP, HTTP, SFTP, etc, access and then we'll talk.

Re:Not quite GDrive, or even S3...

[MushMouth]

It may be cheaper than S3, however S3 only charges you for the things you actually store and bandwidth, there is no need to pay today for space you may need in the future.

So this was their plan all along

[msblack]

So when will they start charging everyone who has used Picassa these new annual fees? I'm sure a lot of people will gladly pay hosting fees.

Re:So this was their plan all along

[glop]

You can already pay with PicasaWeb. That allows you to have more that 1GB. The 1GB option will likely stay free as a way to attract customers.

Is that all they're offering?

[eln]

So I read the article, and all it says is that the stuff you store can be used with Google products like Picasa, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. But, can't anything I store on my own hard drive be uploaded to those apps too?

I can get 500 GB of local storage for $100, and I don't have to worry about what some corporation is going to do with my data. If the only "advantage" to Google's storage is that I can use it with their products, what's the point? Surely Google must have something more to offer than the article states. As it stands, this looks like a great deal if it were 1998, but not so much today.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[nuzak]

> I can get 500 GB of local storage for $100

Yes, and I can get a pair of shoes or a blowjob for that too. What's that got to do with online storage, which presumably you put online for a reason?

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> Yes, and I can get a pair of shoes or a blowjob for that too.

Which store does that combo? I'm heading there as soon as I find out!

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[eln]

That's my point, the "advantage" the article talks about is that you can use the storage with Google's own products. If you could use the storage to, say, host a website or something, then it might be worth it. If all I can do is use it on Google's product offerings, it is a rip off.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[SteelFist]

Well, one of the key advantages of a system like this is having the offsite backup of files -- I can have 10 different hard drives all backing up my data, but if they are all in my apartment and something catastrophic happens to them, then what good are they? This way, I can have a way to recover my data if, for example, a fire burns down the apartments destroying all my DVD backups and hard disk backups. Yes, I know I will have bigger problems than this in such an event, but it's one less thing to worry about.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[durdur]

Despite my concerns about somebody remote and maybe not devoid of evilness having my data, I find some attraction to having my data securely stored and backed up outside my premises. But yeah, I want that to cost less and I probably would probably also want some wider bandwidth, not just crappy DSL, to connect me to it, before it would become really attractive. I expect I'll get those things, eventually.

By the way, I have yet to figure out what is so good about Picasa. They have a neat hack where they can let you geotag your photos but otherwise it doesn't seem impressive at all: Adobe Lightroom is much slicker, IMHO.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[obergfellja]

What's Next for Google? Google OS online? (Google Linux online)

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[dmpyron]

I keep my backups in my safe deposit box.

For $500 I can get a 1TB NAS. Or a 250GB USB/Firewire drive and a night in a very nice hotel.

And anybody who's paying $500 for a pair of shoes or a hummer is paying too much.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[man_of_mr_e]

I'd jump on it if they did something like what mozy does. You can generate your own strong encryption key, and only encrypted data will get stored on the server. All encryption/decryption occurs locally on your computer. That way, nobody can get any data out of the files on the server.

The problem, of course, is whether or not the software to access the service will generate "backup" keys for hive.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I can get 500 GB of local storage for $100

Yes, and I can get a pair of shoes or a blowjob for that too.

Ha! I have a girlfriend, so I can get a blow job for free.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[MightyMait]

I keep my backups in my safe deposit box.

For $500 I can get a 1TB NAS. Or a 250GB USB/Firewire drive and a night in a very nice hotel.

And anybody who's paying $500 for a pair of shoes or a hummer is paying too much. Actually, $500 for a Hummer (even the tiny H3) would be a pretty good deal!!

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[booyagrandma]

i'd argue that being able to access your data from anywhere over the internet will provide a lot of value for average customers. so using it with their products isnt the only advantage; not everyone wants to mess around with rdesktop or the like.

not that i'll be using it.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[romydog]

Good one. Mod this up, plz :-)

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read more carefully. They don't offer it as a combo, it's either/or ... either the shoes or the blowjob.

If you're looking for a combo then $100 will get you a pair of sandals and a reacharound.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Braino420]

Is there a reason you are incapable of encrypting the data yourself? You know, encrypt/decrypt locally on your computer. You would be sure they didn't have access to your key then.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[stoolpigeon]

tanstaafl - most especially in the case of relationships.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, US of A is so expensive! In Amsterdam you only have to pay 40 euros!

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Blobule]

While I agree it's quite expensive especially since it's recurring. One advantage to be had is that it provides a mechanism for an off-site storage location. Your house or business burns down and you still have your data. Part of the question I guess is how easy it would be to backup data to the remote storage area. I imagine that will become very easy using a fuse driver to mount the google storage space as a hard drive. This is superior to using gmail since one would presume changes to the storage mechanism would cause corruption grief :)

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[nmos]

One of the advantages of having non-local storage are that it is safe from fire/flood/theft/whatever that might happen to your local storage. Another advantage is that it makes it easy to share data among users at multiple locations. There are obviously disadvantages too such as slow access speed, high cost, etc but I'm sure some folks will find it useful.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[HTH NE1]

I can get 500 GB of local storage for $100 What's that got to do with online storage, which presumably you put online for a reason?

I can also get 24/7 always-on Internet access for less than $66.67 a month.

2 * (250 GB at $500/yr.) == 500 GB at $1000/yr.

500 GB for $100 leaves $900/yr for access service. Say $100 for a UPS for the server and router. That leaves $800/yr / 12mo/yr == $66.67/mo. That's without amortizing the cost of the drive and UPS over multiple years, which over time would pay for the power. And besides, I'd probably be paying for that Internet access whether I used Google or myself as my on-line data server.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yor doin it wrong. You buy the shoes for your girlfriend.

Wait, this is slashdot...

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Vellmont]

That's my point, the "advantage" the article talks about is that you can use the storage with Google's own products.


The article was written by a journalist for Forbes. It also says nowhere that this is the only way to use the storage.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[HTH NE1]

Actually, $500 for a Hummer (even the tiny H3) would be a pretty good deal!! Like printers, they'll get you on the refill costs.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

$100 for a blowjob? My girlfriend only charges me dinner and a movie. And if I get her drunk I can get even more!

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[jalspach]

Does that mean that then new Payless tag will change from BoGo to BlowGo? Great marketing!

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[rhombic]

I thought you paid for the BJ, then stole your money back & the ho's shoes, too. Must be too much GTA

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[RobertLTux]

And to get closer to what google is overcharging for Laurencemartin.org is hosted by Lunar pages and its 350 gigs for US$99.40 a year

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[man_of_mr_e]

Convenience. There's no way i'm paying that kind of money if it's not safe AND convenient.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[goofyheadedpunk]

English "or" is not always XOR. You are incorrect, sir.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Surt]

I assume google is going to offer you higher speed access to your data than what you (or the typical person) could afford to buy at home (ie more than 1 megabit / second upstream).

I'd also place good odds on google offering indexing and web publishing services eventually, if not right out of the gate.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[IchNiSan]

Its in Playa del Carmen mexico. The shoes are kinda shoddy though.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[slashdotmsiriv]

I heard that Starbucks plans to offer this deal 500 hears in the future ...

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[idiocracy]

Sucks wins

Nice:
1) remote availability: files online to transfer or get access when out and about
2) remote backup

Sucks:
1) expensive: I can get a 500GB drive from frys for $100
2) privacy: do I really want google to know even more about me; yes send me more ads; yes turn over my files when the feds come for it [you better encrypt it]
3) reliability:
  A) GMail goes down so I assume I will not always have access to these files [I cannot put important files there and expect to access them as needed]
  B) My connection goes down (mine does)
4) Hassle: syncing between files
5) Secure: come on you know people are going to try to get at this
6) Speed: depends on scenario, but in general this would be torturous

Doesn't Dell, Apple... do this already?

I do not trust Google [or any other company] and their services that much.
RAID and portable storage may not be utopia but work for me.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[coopaq]

I'm going to head there myself. Hopefully I get there ahead of you. I hope there is a blow out sale. The shoes better not blow. But I hear that store sucks...
done.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Gilmoure]

What if I get her drunk?

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[scottv67]

Yes, and I can get a pair of shoes or a blowjob for that too.

While where you shop for shoes is your own business, I see no reason to drag your mom into this.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[nurb432]

Well, my local storage is available via my home cable internet connection anywhere google-data would be ( and securely too ). I can also run any application i want remotely, and im not stuck with what some 'hosting service' has to offer.

So it sounds like it was a relevant post to me.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[lamona]

Yeah, well that'll be worth $100 any day now.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[shawb]

William S. Burroughs would disagree. Third line after the cough

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[empaler]

I vaguely remember in my youth that the dollar was actually something you could invest in...

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[whoop]

Here's one, how about to offer the file to others to download, without incurring your own ISP's transfer limits. All of Google's apps allow you to create documents, mark them private (so they're not searchable), then gives you a URL you're free to pass along to anyone you want to have download it.

That would be very handy for family photos, videos, etc. I'm sure Google's got a couple smart folks there to catch you when you're offering The Simpson's Movie and 50,000,000 download it at once. I know how you people think...

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[bwy]

What RAID level is your $100 home job storage solution?

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Joebert]

Pair of flipflops from OldNavy.com - $2
Pair of knockoff Gucci heels from ******.com - $20
Pointing out your flipflops in the photo of a stripper blowing you in her knockoff Gucci heels to your buddies, priceless.


Some things money can't buy...

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[theuedimaster]

No, it's a bit more than that. Sure, you can have 500gb easy at home for much cheaper, but is it hosted online so you can share it to the world / siphon it through your own website?

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Nerd4News]

I can get 500 GB of local storage for $100, and I don't have to worry about what some corporation is going to do with my data.

I agree. I recently bought 5 Seagate 500GB drives for $495 shipped from Newegg. That's almost 2T RAID5 and it's local. Beats $500 for 250 GB from Google and have to suffer through upload/download wait times.

If you want offsite storage all you have to do is map a drive to a system in another location. No need for FTP or anything. A buddy and I did this for a while. We set up a share for each other (we both had static IPs) and set up mapped drives on our systems. Pick a work machine, family or friend and plop a 250 GB drive in their system for $50 or $60. And it's still available from anywhere. A one time cost 1/10th the price of one year of Google.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[JackieBrown]

Where the fuck did you find that acronym

To save someone else some time:
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Ohreally_factor]

I was going to suggest that you put quote marks around journalist whenever referring to Forbes. As it happens, the detail-free story is from the AP.

Why did the submitter choose Forbes? The info is directly available from Google. I can't stand Forbes for a lot of reasons. I didn't glance at my status bar when I clicked the link, but suffice it to say that my reaction was the same as when I clicked a Lemon Party link.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Kashkalgar]

400 Gb (Samsung :P) for 84.99 on Newegg.com Havent found the 500Gb for 100$, but this is within 5$. If you want to pay for (somewhat) unreliable storage, this is probably the benchmark.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Ohreally_factor]

I did exactly what you're talking about, and my server got ripped off! It seems obvious now, but it never occurred to me that I should put the server indoors somewhere safe. Oh, well, live and learn.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

"So I read the article, and all it says is that the stuff you store can be used with Google products like Picasa, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. But, can't anything I store on my own hard drive be uploaded to those apps too?"

What's the fucking difference? Does gmail not have an upload attachment field for emails you can send to yourself? It's even nice an searchable. Or are you bitching that they have no webdav interface for you?

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[stoolpigeon]

I personally first encountered it as a child - in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. It is used with heavy frequency here at the dot, so it is probably a bit less obscure than you might think.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[rtb61]

Not only that, what about the security of your data and what privacy restrictions will google implement. Not only are you volunteering your private data to google your also paying for the privilege of that extra deep review of your private bits.

With google having to abandon it's video rental service as a result of being unable to gain sufficient market share to make the service viable, it is now scratching to generate sufficient income to justify it's share price.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? On Aug 10, you are a subscriber. Aug 11 - you are not?

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[DragonWriter]

The article was written by a journalist for Forbes. It also says nowhere that this is the only way to use the storage.

Well, the Forbes article might not, the Official Google Blog post on the new offering does say just that: That's why the Picasa team is pleased to tell you that in a few hours we'll be rolling out extra storage that you can purchase to use across several Google products (today, Picasa Web Albums and Gmail; soon, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets).

Google's paid storage is, as far as anything I can find from Google, only planning to support Google Applications, and currently only supports Gmail and Picasa.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[HTH NE1]

I assume google is going to offer you higher speed access to your data than what you (or the typical person) could afford to buy at home (ie more than 1 megabit / second upstream).

Is there a point to having your data served to you faster than your own access can deliver it to you? If you roll your own, when on your own LAN with it you can access it at gigabit speeds.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Fjornir]

Wow. You're missing out. You need to read some Heinlein.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[Surt]

There's a point to having your data served faster if you can have multiple people access it concurrently. IE, provide access to your latest home movie project to hundreds of people, without necessarily having to go as public as youtube.

Re:Is that all they're offering?

[stoolpigeon]

thanks for pointing that out - i didn't even notice.

Finally!

[bigtangringo]

I've been waiting forever for them to come out with something like this. I'm sure they'd be required to hand over any data if the men who ride in black helicopters come asking, so it's a good thing there's TrueCrypt :D

Re:Finally!

[bigtangringo]

Ah hell, looks like I've spoken too soon. It appears to only be extra storage for existing services :-\

Doomed

[Anonymous Coward]

Way too expensive. Portable hard drives (or soon, larger capacity flash drives) are already all the rage: they are cheaper, faster, and aren't limited by the user's broadband internet connection. What was Google thinking on this one?

Re:Doomed

[Anonymous Crowhead]

What was Google thinking on this one?

Gippy: I see you are uploading pictures of flowers. Perhaps you would be interested in buying some dahlia bulbs for Bulbs backwards R Us.

Re:Doomed

[zero2k]

You seem to be living in the closet. Its purpose is for "online" data distribution, ie families and friends sharing photos and video clips, photographers showcasing their client portfolio, e-merchants advertising and cataloging their products, and the list goes on.

Re:Doomed

[WombatDeath]

I can see myself signing up to something like this: it's basically an inexpensive way to ensure that the stuff I really want to keep is safe and available. I trust Google's back-up processes far more than I trust my own, and this way I don't have to piss about with external storage which can be lost/damaged/stolen.

Re:Doomed

[scapermoya]

...that you can access it from any computer in the world at any time at a speed that will only be limited by YOUR connection?

Re:Doomed

[WombatDeath]

As an aside, I liked the up-beat end to the article.

"Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage ...blah blah blah...Google shares fell $2.08 to $512.65 in afternoon trading."

Re:Doomed

[just_another_sean]

While I'm not saying I'm "Mr. Backup" I do feel pretty good about my backup procedures over Google's for now. Remeber this little event? Now to be fair they worked hard with people and admitted responsibilty right up front but in the end there was data that they simpy could not recover.

The only advantage here over doing it yourself that I can see is the geographic seperation between yuo and your backups. If your building burns down but all the backup tapes are in the office then you're screwed. Smarter plans include taking the backups offsite but for personal data that's a pain.

If I were to use this at all it would be in conjunction with my own personal backup and storage plan. The google storage would be relegated to the status of safety net. Without bothering to link to any for now I would guess that there are cheaper solutions out there for this scenario.

Re:Doomed

[dgatwood]

sbluB ???

Re:Doomed

[jayloden]

Yeah, and that way if my house gets flooded, I'll have lots of backups of my data on those external drives. Which are in my house. Underwater.

For what you're getting (highly redundant storage at a remote site), it's really not that expensive at all. For $20 bucks a year I can have my data safely warehoused at a remote location by a reliable provider. My hosting plan where I keep that data now costs $30 a *month* for 20G of storage and the accompanying bandwidth etc. If you add that up it's $360 a year I pay, versus $75 for Google's 25G offering. Granted, I get other things with my hosting package such as the ability to run servers and scripts, but it's not as if Google's pricing model is outrageous, put in perspective.

All I can say is I personally am intrigued at the prospect of using this as *another* way of backing up my most treasured data (code I've written, documents, etc) so that everything isn't backed up at one location in my house. The last thing I want to be doing if my house is on fire is worrying about grabbing my hard drive(s) ;)

Re:Doomed

[Maltheus]

it's basically an inexpensive way to ensure that the stuff I really want to keep is safe

I think you mean it's an easy way. You may not trust your backup process but it's far cheaper to simply do it yourself.

Re:Doomed

[WombatDeath]

Sure, but my data storage requirements are fairly modest. 6GB is plenty, $20/year is pretty trivial and with a service like this I can forget about the data until I need it. If I had a quarter of a terabyte of important data (and I really can't imagine that happening) I'd probably look for alternatives. As it stands, this suits me nicely.

Privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, is google going to search through all my content to see what I have?

Then send me more targeted advertisements when I use their services? You know that they can link all that up.

Just how "do no evil" will google be with all this information on you available at their fingertips?

I suppose you could just always encrypt all your uploads... hmm.

Re:Privacy?

[accessdeniednsp]

That would be OK too, because then they can detected it encrypted with "foo algorithm" and send you a targeted advertisement that "Biz bang Algorithm is better" and then offer you links to crypto products and stuff. Either way, they win :) It's brilliant.

Re:Privacy?

[Samalie]

So, is google going to search through all my content to see what I have?

I forsee a massive eruption in ameteur pornography available through google searches in the near future.

I will probably use it.

[Pinkfud]

Yes, it's a bit costly. But for all the times I've wanted to be able to transfer stuff from one place to another without having made any plans for it (like burning a DVD), and given the reliability of Google, I'll probably buy the 6G plan for myself.

Re:I will probably use it.

[DonCarlos]

It still may go faster to just burn these data on DVD and send it using DHL/USPS than first waste hours uploading such amount of data and then getting it back.

Re:I will probably use it.

[Brome]

So it's $20 per year for a 6 GB online space. That you can only use in conjonction with Google's services.

I don't know about your ISP, but mine provides me with a free online storage of 10 GB, accessible via FTP and HTTP (with PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL support).

So, yes, I would say that $20 a year is too expensive.

I won't be making use of it

[larry bagina]

who knows what kind of data mining they'll be doing.

Re:I won't be making use of it

[undercanopy]

you think? that sounds more like the arena of a cheap/free service. at these rates, it had better be private. how to ensure that w/o encrypting your data first? that's a different story.

Re:I won't be making use of it

[eln]

You're right. Just like a game manufacturer wouldn't dream of trying to make extra money by slapping advertisements all over a game I already paid $60 for, Google would never try to make extra cash data mining storage that they are already being paid for.

Re:I won't be making use of it

[M. Baranczak]

at these rates, it had better be private. You think that just because you give them 20 bucks a year, they care about your privacy?

Re:I won't be making use of it

[DigiShaman]

As long as the "advertisements" are non-intrusive, I could care less as a gamer. It's all about how the method is implemented for your audience.

There's a big different between walking past a virtual vending machine (that you can also blow up with an RPG) that says Coke/Pepsi, and a banner that pauses the game for 10 second while the Coke/Pepsi flashes on your entire TV screen.

Re:I won't be making use of it

[undercanopy]

well, i was thinking more of the higher rates. Though i think in general there's a higher expectation of privacy when the service is being paid for than when it's free. When it's free, they need to be able to make their money somehow, so they do their indexy stuff on the data. When i'm paying for it, hands off.

ami saying they won't? no. i do think, however, it would be more 'evil' to do so on a non-free service.

so, 6g/year for $20? has anyone come up with Gdrive concatenation/striping yet? load up on the gmail accounts and have at it.

Re:I won't be making use of it

[undercanopy]

bit of a difference between product placement in a video game and indexing my private data in a pay-for storage service, no?

IIRC you can pay for (corp accounts) ad-free versions of gmail... it stands to reason that pay-for storage might be index-free.

again, i'm guessing. but personally i'm more likely to put up with indexing my data on a free account, but once i start paying for it, well there are plenty of services that don't do that and have competitive pricing, right? If not, let me know, i've got a bunch of rackspace and i won't index your data.

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

$500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage Let's just say I'm not going to move my pr0n collection to their service anytime soon.

Well,

[martinelli]

I've always had an issue with online storage. Sure, you have a massive capacity. But, think about the time it takes you to upload, download, etc. For the $500 a year pricetag on the 250gb drive, I could go out and purchase a few 250gb external drives. Although online storage is great for protecting against a physical disaster, it's simply too clumsy right now to be used effectively.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always had an issue with online storage. Sure, you have a massive capacity. But, think about the time it takes you to upload, download, etc. For the $500 a year pricetag on the 250gb drive, I could go out and purchase a few 250gb external drives. Although online storage is great for protecting against a physical disaster, it's simply too clumsy right now to be used effectively.

If you have a slow Internet connection (under 10Mbps upstream) and think that $500 annual fee is a lot for 250GB online space, you may not be in Google's target group. Go ahead and buy external disks, but it's not an option to those needing lots of high availability online disk space.

Re:Well,

[bladesjester]

I have to agree. Even at decent connection speeds, uploading that much data would take quite a while (not to mention the price being a bit excessive). I also don't exactly trust Google with that much minable information.

Also, on your comment about external drives, the 320GB Wester Digital external drive that I picked up a couple of months ago was about $120.

Re:Well,

[prozac79]

Although online storage is great for protecting against a physical disaster, it's simply too clumsy right now to be used effectively

I've been super paranoid about losing my data, especially if my backup drive dies, is stolen, or the earth opens up and swallows my apartment. But I had the same issues as you as to finding a good online storage company. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, try Mozy. It's cheap ($5/month for unlimited storage) and has a pretty unobtrusive backup desktop client. Yeah, the initial upload of data took a while, but now my incremental backups only take a few minutes each night. It's main purpose is backup, so it's not like an online hard drive where you can access your data anywhere. Oh, and if you do have a major disaster, you can get your data on DVDs too (for a price). It's good peace of mind for $5/month.

Re:Well,

[pla]

I've always had an issue with online storage.

You don't use it as a primary form of storage. You would use it as a mirror of data you need kept in sync on several physically separate systems. Keep in mind, "you" may not refer to a single person...



But, think about the time it takes you to upload, download, etc.

Again, you wouldn't use this as a first-line data store. You'd only need to tranfer changes, from a "source" or "mirror" POV. From a "nonmirrored destination" perspective, modern broadband connections can keep up with realtime DVD playback.



Although online storage is great for protecting against a physical disaster, it's simply too clumsy right now to be used effectively.

Unless they promise zero lost data (with a sizeable financial compensation to give it some balls), I wouldn't use this as a backup. As a shared 6GB drive between any machine you touch, though? I'd pay $20/year for that convenience, if I didn't have the ability to do so already.



I think Google has a good idea here. Don't think of this as a geek-targetted replacement to portable HDDs, or a backup solution, or even huge web-accessible file store. Think in terms of social networks... Think in terms of your P2P share folder, except instead of needing to hit your machine (or suffer through hitting some poor bastard on dialup), you have all the bandwidth of Google for every transfer. Think in terms of Grandma (who has no grasp whatsoever of cropping, resizing, or JPEG quality) trying to email you a whole 100+ picture album of family photos.

Think "Rapidshare that you own", and you'll get closer to the target market here.

Re:Well,

[Xtravar]

For the $500 a year pricetag on the 250gb drive, I could go out and purchase a few 250gb external drives. Although online storage is great for protecting against a physical disaster, it's simply too clumsy right now to be used effectively. Folks, we're backing up important documents and perhaps large files which are occasionally transferred. Not your entire porn collection.

If you're trying to transfer your porn collection from one computer to another then this obviously isn't the solution and you're looking at this the wrong way. This is a how much is your important data and its uptime worth? question. Perhaps they also have other little features that make it convenient.

Re:Well,

[gatesvp]

I'll actually take that one step further. Get an inexpensive backup drive with automatic encryption and throw that thing in your backpack/briefcase/car when you go out or go to work. Admiteddly, the off-line stuff is cool, but it will take days to retrieve your data.

You're primarily worried about an off-site backup in the extreme case of say, your home burning down. If your home burns down and you're not around, then you have the backup drive with you. If your home burns down and you are around, then what's left of you probably doesn't need the data anymore. Obviously, this doesn't scale if you have family or co-workers or friends that depend upon this data, but that's a totally different issue.

The other option of course, is to rotate drives and just keep one at the office (or wherever else you go regularly). If the office and the house both burn down on the same night (and they're different buildings), then you've had one hell of a crisis and maybe your computer data is not the most relevant issue right now (what you not having a home or a workplace).

I don't care

[wandm]

I don't care if it were free. I don't want The Central Brain(TM) to scan my files.

Re:I don't care

[krunchyfrog]

You're right. Brain (from Pinky and the Brain) is executing his new plan to take over the world!

It's Pinky and The Brain, it's Pinky and The Brain
One is a genius, the other's insane!

Amazon S3

[Usquebaugh]

I use Amazon S3 through Gorilla Disk. I also use it directly through Python and Ruby.

Amazon has it right in this instance. The cost is less and is dynamic.

I'm looking at starting a small app hosting company and S3 will definitely work better than Google, my costs grow with my business, no upfront expenses etc.

Re:Amazon S3

[stirfry714]

Do you mean JungleDisk? I Googled for GorillaDisk, and couldn't find it...

Looks cool... I might have to check them out for my backups...

Re:Amazon S3

[gordyf]

I use JungleDisk on MacOS X and Linux, and it's awesome. Just Works.

Re:Amazon S3

[crt]

I think you mean Jungle Disk, which allows you to connect to Amazon S3 from your desktop, as well as do automatic backup.

At $0.15/gb/month, S3 is already priced better than Google - especially considering you only pay for what you use with no need to pre-pay for a bunch of storage in advance.

S3 is really a different service - you can store anything on it, whereas the Google storage can apparently only be used from Google apps (for now). The other advantage of using software like Jungle Disk with S3 is that your data is encrypted before even leaving your machine, and neither Amazon nor anyone else can access it.

Re:Amazon S3

[jfisherwa]

Can you netboot from it yet? :)

Re:Amazon S3

[yelvington]

S3Fox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/324 7
Integrates an upload/download interface for Amazon S3 into Firefox. Very slick and very free.

Re:Amazon S3

[Lost Engineer]

Looks like it's only cheaper at 100GB+ to me.

Seems like most people should be able to get their important documents into the 6GB drive.

Re:Amazon S3

[lushmore]

I have to chime in on how much JungleDisk kicks ass. It works on Linux, Windows, and Mac, and there's even a USB key version so that you can access your data on the go. Local caching means you can save on transfer charges, plus you can save now and let your data trickle up later. I run the command line version on my Linux server, and all my other machines access it via the native webdav interface, allowing the multiple clients to share the one cache.

I try to be diligent about rotating disks offsite, but it's so much better to have the convenience of local cached storage that's backed up and available anywhere.

Re:Amazon S3

[InakaBoyJoe]

Wow. Thank you for sharing this information. The FAQ/comparison data on the JungleDisk site managed to address pretty much all my requirements in one swoop. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for them (I don't have any relationship with them or S3 or whatnot, I'm just excited about finding something that *finally* works)...

* No tiered overselling BS - using S3 I'm never going to have to worry about managing my "plan" level.
* Reasonable software licensing terms (buy once, run many)
* Minimal worries about lock-in -- WebDAV is standard, works with rsync, no continuing licence fees, cross-platform, and they've even open-sourced the guts of the only proprietary component, the JungleDisk sw itself.
* Minimal worries about amazon going away, losing data, having brownouts, or changing pricing drastically any time soon. Most likely reliable, reasonably secure, fast connection to the data centre.
* Reasonable fees, both for S3 and the client sw.

As far as I'm concerned that's a home run set of features.

Can't wait to get home and try it out tonight...

$20 per year for 6 gigs?

[Anonymous Coward]

why not signup for 2 gmail accounts, $free

$500 / 250 GB

[3p1ph4ny]

Why do that when I can buy two $250 drives and put them in a mirror RAID array? I'll probably get more storage, and it will last longer.

Re:$500 / 250 GB

[igb]

So long as your house doesn't burn down. And you don't get burgled. And you don't live somewhere prone to flood or hurricane. I'd merrily pay that sort of money for that sort of storage, because moving portable drives offsite is getting tedious. With my office hat on, the fibre pull completes Tuesday for 2Gbps to a datacentre in the next city to replicate 40TB to. Yeah, I have tapes: but moving them by hand is tedious. Same idea, smaller bill.

Re:$500 / 250 GB

[syphax]

Assuming that your place is immune from fire, flooding and the like.

I use Carbonite for an offsite backup of files I'd really hate to lose. It's pretty good. FWIW I don't participate in their referral program, so my endorsement is from the heart.

Re:$500 / 250 GB

[izomiac]

Because having your data on the internet makes it more accessible, and if your house burns down you won't lose it. Plus RAID controllers aren't free and often require some setup/maintenance.

Re:$500 / 250 GB

[toddestan]

At Google's prices at $500 for 250GB for a year, you could buy 2 250GB drives, put them in a mirrored array, then buy 2 external drives for offsite backups, and still have money left in your pocket. I really don't see a widespread market for this.

Hrm...

[Mr. Underbridge]

According to the company's official blog, the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's office applications.

Seems a little underwhelming - if they had a sanctioned Google Drive that I could connect to from Windows or Linux, anywhere in the world, that would be cool. FTP access would be nice. But to pay $20/year for 6 more gigs without any functionality I don't have now...nah.

Pipe

[DonCarlos]

And what about the bandwidth?

Reason for cost...

[Treskin]

Possibly to prevent people using it for piracy? Obviously this would make for high speed transfers of large amounts of data. People who have a specific use for it likely won't mind the mid-level cost, but few people are going to blow that kind of money to use as a "distro" for software/movies etc. compared to other solutions.

GRAHHH

[Anonymous Coward]

It's THEY'RE. That is all.

Definitely too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a customer a PowWeb, and for $5.77/mo I get:
# 300 GB Disk Space
# 3000 GB/mo Bandwidth
# FREE Domain Name
# Unlimited Mailboxes
# 75 MySQL Databases
# Host UNLIMITED Domains

Yes, it sounds like an ad, but no, it isn't meant to be... I was lazy and copied their site for what I get.

Sure, I don't get shell access, which sucks... but what do you expect for under $6/mo? It's plenty fine for my image galleries of hi-res images (they have an installer for Gallery also).

-RC

Re:Definitely too expensive

[Master of Transhuman]

Dreamhost has basically the same thing for $9.95/month on a monthly basis, less on an annual or two-year basis - except you start with half the bandwidth and disk space of your plan - but it grows weekly - 1GB space per week, 16GB bandwidth weekly. I don't know what amount I've got now but it's something huge.

But yeah, why spend a fortune on disk storage plans when your Web site is basically one big disk storage plan? AND your Web site has all this stuff like unlimited MySQL databases, CGI, Perl, Gallery, etc. - you can do anything with that space. much more than the plain storage plans offer.

What does google offer...

[vigmeister]

That a $200 computer I can build with 750GB of storage and is always online cannot?

Given the occasional inaccessibility of GMail, if this data is not ALWAYS AVAILABLE, I don't see the point of the exercise. The only other advantage I can see are download speeds, but upload speeds are getting better day by day. If I pool with 3-4 other people for a solid internet connection (or if I am in college), I am all set...

Re:What does google offer...

[Richard_at_work]

What does Google offer that your $200 computer can't? Redundancy. Massive redundancy.

Re:What does google offer...

[vigmeister]

Again, if it is not available to me 24x7 (I know gmail is not and there were instances of gmail losing people's mail), what is the point?

Cheers!
--
Vig

Expensive and unreliable?

[FlyByPC]

For one, it's expensive; you could buy many times the storage by buying the hardware yourself; it would be cheaper to go with RAID-1 and replace the drives every year whether they needed it or not.

Also, even assuming that Google's new service is:

• trustworthy (I.E. they don't peek at your data),
• reliable,
• secure (hackerproof and disasterproof; aren't they based in CA?), and
• speedy (and it ain't ever gonna be as fast as a locally-attached HD)

...there's still the question of your own Internet connection; I for one don't want to lose access to my files every time my cable connection decides it needs a day off. It's been pretty reliable lately, but still.

On the "trustworthy" issue, I trust Google as much as just about any company -- but I don't trust anyone 100%, so why risk it?

Bottom line -- call me a dinosaur (OK, it fits; I enjoy BASIC and Assembler), but I'd rather do it myself.

Yeah, yeah, you say -- but what about portable storage? OK, I admit, this would be convenient -- but I still think the drawbacks (even money being no object) far outweigh bringing the data you need with you. Heck, for that money, you could seriously think about one of those new solid-state drives! How's that for reliability?

Re:Expensive and unreliable?

[oskay]

I can't believe that you used "trustworthy" and I.E. in the same breath.

Re:Expensive and unreliable?

[Raisey-raison]

I would like to know whether this means I can use the storage for a website. IE - I have 100 gb of data on a website and they can be accessed as often as wanted without having to worry about using up more than a quota of data transfered. If I can do this then this service is great. If it's just for personal storage it is way overpriced.

Re:Expensive and unreliable?

[LordLucless]

I'd probably buy into this just for offsite backup of my important data.

• Google's trustworthiness isn't really an issue - it's easy enough to encrypt the output of my backup scripts before the data is transferred, and I generally wouldn't be accessing the data directly from Google's service, so there's no reason to have it in plaintext.
• Well, you'd hope so - Google have had quite a bit of experience at keeping stuff online, and I'd imagine they're a fairly large target. Even if they screwed up, encryption would help here (the hackers couldn't get anything useful), and as its a backup, unless my primary system died simultaneously, it would still be ok. And I'd hope Google would have backup and disaster recovery themselves anyway.
• Automated backups, who really cares about the speed?

I don't think this is intended to replace local storage (or at least, not in the immediate future). But for backups, or sharing files, or remote access to certain files, it'll probably do ok. As long as you trust Google, or don't put anything sensitive up there, there's really no dramas.

Re:Expensive and unreliable?

[blamanj]

I think this misses the point somewhat. This is not add-on storage for your computer data, it's on-line storage for things you want to be accessible from anywhere on the net. Yes, your USB hard drive is way cheaper, but if you're trying to make your photo collection available anyone not connected to your machine is out of luck. This is shared/internet storage more than private/personal storage.

Re:Expensive and unreliable?

[Arkaine101]

Two suggestions: Don't get hit by lightning, and pray that your power supply doesn't fry your hard disks.

To eliminate these two risks, you'll want to rsync that RAID-1 box with another RAID-1 box at a second location.

there

[N7DR]

Is this too expensive for what there offering

Sigh.

Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.

Re:there

[gEvil (beta)]

Fine. Editors, please correct this typo. It should read: "Is this to expensive for what their offering."

Re:there

[IBBoard]

Don't you mean "thair"?

I'm surprised that the comment picking up on the misspelling of "they're" (as in "what they are offering") as "there" is so far down the page :)

Re:there

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Sigh.

Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.

Sigh.

Here we go again. Another Brit using British slang and just expecting the rest of the world to understand. I had to go to dictionary.com, but for those of us who aren't Brits
cosh = bludgeon

Re:there

[kalidasa]

Is this too expensive for what there offering

Sigh.

Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.

While I feel your pain (or at least that inflicted by yonder blunt-force surgeon), I have to toss in one little warning: if you're going to drop a name in a spelling flame, it would be best not to cite a fellow who couldn't decide how to render his own last name. Was Shakespeare the master of the English language? Yes. Was he a master of regular orthography? Hell, no.

Re:there

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it should read, "Is this too expensive for what they're offering?"

English is such fun :)

Re:there

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the anonymous coward that submitted the story. Zonk changed my words and left the poorly worded question inside the

. What a sham!

Re:there

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, less-than-blockquote-greater-than-dot-what-a-sham- less-than-forward-slash-blockquote-greater-than indeed.

Re:there

[Duke]

Is this too expensive for what there offering
  Sigh.
  Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.

No, no, no. You don't understand.

There offering = advertising online storage
Here offering = advertising local storage

Re:there

[klenwell]

"Irish by birth, French by sympathy, I have been condemned by the English to speak the language of Shakespeare."

-- Oscar Wilde (translated from the French)

And spell it correctly on /.

Re:there

[DohnJoe]

please tell me your not serious...

Applications: Trickle backup

[Sanity]

It seems that the most likely use of this is as a remote backup, given how cheap desktop storage is these days (about $2/GB last time I checked), and the bandwidth constraints of pulling large quantities of data from a remote server when you need it.

What is needed is a convenient automatic "trickle backup" system. This will do incremental backups to this service whenever you are online, but which is smart enough to stop if you need your internet connection, or if you disconnect. In such circumstances it will resume the backup process seamlessly once you go back online, or once your upstream is available again.

This seems like an obvious idea to me, and so it may already exist - but if not, I could see it being a very nice open source project. Unfortunately I've got one or two projects keeping me way too busy already or I would consider it.

To do it really-well might require server-side support though, so you could do things like coalescing incremental backups without having to pull the data back to the client and re-uploading.

Re:Applications: Trickle backup

[verbila]

Mozy does this (http://www.mozypro.com/mozy_pro/comparison/), and they just started supporting Macs in addition to PCs. Great service. Simple, hassle-free, encrypted. No, I don't work for them. Just a satisfied user. They have a free version of their service, too (2Gb).

Re:Applications: Trickle backup

[imsabbel]

You are living in 2002. Nowdays, storage is at 20c /Gbyte...

Re:Applications: Trickle backup

[42forty-two42]

I don't know if a convenient 'trickle' uploader exists yet, but I'm setting up a backup scheme for myself that uses duplicity to upload to Amazon's S3, and uses an EC2 instance for a few hours each month to coalesce the incremental backups into a full backup. Since this is for my VPS, I don't worry too much about using a lot of bandwidth when it runs the backup (the incrementals are usually small anyway).

Re:Applications: Trickle backup

[Sanity]

I was basing my estimate on $500 for a 1TB drive, and yes, I screwed up - that would be 50c/Gb, but where do you get 20c/Gb?

Re:Applications: Trickle backup

[PeterChenoweth]

The lowest cost/GB I can find is about $.24/GB. 500GB external USB drives can easily be found online for about $120.

Re:Applications: Trickle backup

[LurkerXXX]

Watch techbargains or slickdeals. You can often find 500 gig drives for $90 or less.

Same problem

[Otter]

This has the same problem that XDrive had in 1995 and Eazel had in 1999: storage and networks have evolved at a pace where the latter is expensive and the former is cheap. The amount of storage you can efficiently access is just a fraction of a normal hard drive. If things had worked out differently, and we'd had DSL with 25 meg hard drives, it would have been completely different.

This is useful for w4r3z and child porn, nothing else.

Carbonite

[syphax]

I am a reasonably satisfied with Carbonite. It's cheap and reasonably secure (data is encrypted).

However it is a pure backup service; it doesn't allow, for example, remote access to the backup from another machine, which would be useful on occasion.

Re:Carbonite

[Blahbooboo3]

And the encryption uses THEIR key. So your data is NOT private if they choose to look.

Companies are going to dig this

[atom.galaxy]

I'll bet my ears most companies are going to buy at least a part of this plan. Quite some large companies I know use Google docs, and this might be the very thing for the most crucial data (encrypted, of course). Sure, they might have backups in underground safes and everything, but I think that when it comes to backups, these people don't kid. It might be useful for other stuff as well, but I see this as a backup system.

ad-ish, but true

[SolusSD]

Well since this story is mostly an advertisement, i'll point out that storage at Dreamhost (See sig) is far cheaper and you get all the perks of a full blwon web hosting service. Starts @ $9.99/mo for around 200GB storage, tons of bandwidth, ftp/sftp/ssh/telnet/etc access, databases, thousands of email accounts, free domain with the ability to host as many as you want, unlimited subdomains, user acount controls, clean server directory structure (ie, /home/username/mydomain.tld), etc, etc, etc..

Re:ad-ish, but true

[bladesjester]

I think they're hoping that since it's Google offering the service, that it will magically be viewed as superior to everything else no matter the cost. I wouldn't want Google to have their claws on all of my data anyway.

I agree with your "advertisement" of dreamhost. I've heard a lot of good things about them, and plan for all of my future sites to be through them unless I have something that I need dedicated hosting for.

go figure

[markybob]

interesting that googling "google online storage" doesnt come up with the home page of this new service...in my book that means it doesnt exist :p

Depends on the Services that go with it!

[spiedrazer]

If they are offering backup etc. than I would say it's worth the price!

Re:Depends on the Services that go with it!

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not offering, there offering. That changes everything.

Re:Depends on the Services that go with it!

[pavera]

Wrong...
You can get unlimited backup for $70/yr, go check out mozy.com

$500 for 250GB? That is bizarre, you can go buy a 500GB HD for a lot less than that, just spend that money buying hard drives every year, and you'll have 5 terabytes soon enough.

They're...not There

[crappyman]

That is all. Try again and proofread, friends. Revision revision revision

Grammer

[NIN1385]

I cannot stand seeing news articles where people don't know the difference between there, they're and their. That's just me though.

Re:Grammer

[xarnx]

Ahem. It's spelled grammar.

Re:Grammer

[bladesjester]

You beat me to it :P

I just loved the irony involved in his post.

Storage = Truck

[Anonymous Coward]

And again, online storage is something you just dump something on. It's a big truck. It's not a series of tubes.

Sincerely,
Ted Stevens (R-AK)

Re:Storage = Truck

[Master of Transhuman]

No, Senator, it's not a truck - it's a safe. It doesn't move.

You're the dump truck.

re: disaster recovery?

[King_TJ]

My first thought about these services is, it has real potential for people who need to ensure they don't lose important photos or other documents.

Sure, you can set up regular backups to an external hard drive, set up a fault-tolerant RAID system perhaps, or burn your important stuff to DVD or CD. But none of that helps if your house catches on fire while you're out and all those things go up in flames. Backups also have the nasty tendency to be "out of reach" when you need them. (EG. You go on an important business trip and your laptop's hard drive crashes. You can probably borrow a loaner to get your business presentations done, but what about the data itself?)

The big question is always, how easy is it to get your data uploaded to them? Most home users are using cable or DSL where they may get good download speeds, but their upload speeds are relatively poor. If they decide to upload several gigabytes of photos, they may get frustrated or confused with how long it takes to finish that. I think software is needed to handle this gracefully ... uploading in the background and giving the user a small status icon they can check (by rolling the mouse over it or something). You can't expect people to sit for an hour in some browser window with a progress bar drawn that hasn't moved in the last 10 minutes, with some kind of "Please wait....." message up there.

Too expensive

[jshriverWVU]

I use ixwebhosting.com for my websites, and for less than $150 a year I get 500gigs of bandwith a month and unlimited storage.

Granted I asked them and this doesnt mean upload a couple terabytes, but I have easily hosted over 60gigs with no problems.

And that's for a full out web hosting solution. Note: I dont work there or anything, just a very happy customer.

Two Words

[Ravenscall]

Fire Safe

Re:Two Words

[hondo77]

Two more words: "earth" and "quake".

YMMV outside of California.

Re:Two Words

[mrchaotica]

Fire safes are "fire-resistant," which is a very different thing than "fire-proof." Keeping your data safe for 10 minutes while the still-structurally-intact house burns around it is one thing; keeping it safe after having been buried in white-hot smoldering coals for an hour (because, for whatever reason, the firemen couldn't get there) is entirely another.

How is it practical to businsses or the consumer?

[ipyakuza]

I'm not sure how useful a solution this is for either the business or home user. Most US home users are on Comcast or DSL both which are slow in my book if you are trying to move large files too and from your online storage. The only people with that much patients are pirates or anyone downloading a linux distro :) It's much easier (and most importantly secure) to store your stuff on a micro portable drive these days and encrypt it. Speaking for businesses, I'm an IT manager and storing business related content (even the not so sensitive stuff) on public service providers systems makes little sense. Especially since these days many publicly traded companies have to worry about compliance (I don't think any smart company would put sensitive information on a share like this but hey, if it can, it will happen). The only useful means of online storage would be to hold content for download or playback linked from your site if you don't have a lot of bandwidth but expect a ton of visitors to flood the downloads. I don't know, I just don't see any practical use for it all.

Hard Drives

[pseudosero]

Are, according to my mental memory calculations, a dollar a gig.

Re:How is it practical to businsses or the consume

[pavera]

I disagree as far as downloading is concerned, comcast at 8mbps is pretty fast, I can download a linux distro in ~ an hour, which is much better than it was 5-6 years ago.

Now, where this service fails is on the upload side. Everyone throttles upload to bizarre levels, 378kbps is good, some dsl will let you get 768... but either way, if you're going to be uploading 50GB, that is WEEKS of having your upstream bandwidth completely tapped.

I signed up for mozy (online backup) and discontinued after 1 month... I was trying to back up ~40GB, and it took nearly 3 weeks... and then failed, and I had to start over again. During this time because the upload is totally maxed out, the download suffers, latency goes through the roof, even just little web browsing is painful (like dial up speeds)... so this is why this is more than useless for a home user. For businesses that might have multi-meg uploads, it might be a little useful... but I'd rather just buy a linux box with a bunch of drives and get more storage for less locally.

Official post and links

[FleaPlus]

The Forbes article didn't link to it, so here's the official announcement from Google:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/simple-way- to-get-more-storage.html

Also, here's the link for actually purchasing the additional space:

https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage

At the time being, this doesn't seem to be a standalone storage service (the summary was kind of ambiguous about this), but rather a way to upgrade the space you have on additional Google services (gmail, Picasa, etc.). In any case, I'd really love it if they eventually came out with a storage service that you could use as a CVS/SVN repository.

Re:Official post and links

[smitth1276]

freepository.com used to have free accounts for CVS. I don't know if its still free.

Re:Official post and links

[FleaPlus]

Cool, thanks for the link, although I think I need rather more space than they offer. I'm hoping to do something like keeping an entire home directory in SVN:

http://kitenet.net/~joey/svnhome/

Ouch...

[msimm]

For music at least I'd definitely go with mp3tunes. Their pricing model is much more consumer friendly (starting at free) and the service is purpose built. For general purpose storage, if I wanted or needed it I don't think I could justify paying that kind of price. Even though I'm sure their reliability is best of breed (which I know needs to be figured into the total cost, but 100GB these days is nothing).

For whom?

[Dusty00]

For any /.ers, yea that's just a dumb idea. I think it's a great service for Joe user. When it comes to tech my father's dumber than a load of wood (he uses AOL for god sakes). So he really needs to have his machine wiped and reloaded every few months at best. It would be great for him to just be able to dump stuff he wants to survive his reloads onto Google.

Offsite backup, juste encrypt it

[obarthelemy]

'nugh said

Re:Offsite backup, juste encrypt it

[misleb]

Then you find that your private key for your backup was destroyed with the files that you lost. Do'h! I don't know which is worse, not having a backup or having a backup that you can't access because you lost the keys.

Yeah, yeah, store your keys on external media or something... Still, something to consider.

Use encryption

[joggle]

You could, you know, encrypt your data using something like PGP. There's also an older free version of PGP here.

Re:Use encryption

[piojo]

I would argue that using such a program to encrypt your data before each backup is more annoying than burning a disc and putting it somewhere safe. And why don't we all have a good backup regimen? Because they're annoying.

I pay $10 per month for web hosting that I use for backup. I actually use about 5GB of data, and my incremental transfers (using rsync) need about 5MB bandwidth per transfer, with 1-3 transfers per day, depending on my mood. None of this data is extremely secretive. Probably enough for a very skilled social engineer to steal my identity, but it wouldn't be easy, and I believe in taking acceptable risks. I am much more worried about my old laptop dying.

S3 might be cheaper, and it might fit my needs better. But is it easier? Nah. (Would I actually end up doing regular backups? No.) I pay more so I can be lazy. Also, I don't need reliability. I just need to beat the odds of my laptop dying and my webserver dying on the same day.

Not to be nitpicker, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Is this too expensive for what there offering ... you misused the word "there".

There must be used when you mean "their". Using it for "They're" is overdoing.

BTW, English is not my native language -- and I'm sure thankful for that.

Can I use it to increase Gmail's capacity?

[prxp]

According to the company's official blog, the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's office applications.

Does this mean that if I run out of space on my Gmail account I can simply buy out some extra space in the form of this new Google's online storage service and use it to increase my Gmail account's capacity?

Re:Can I use it to increase Gmail's capacity?

[jkiol]

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer. py?answer=65430

Why not just use a web host?

[Carbon016]

My web host gives me 2TB of storage and doesn't give a damn if I use it for file storage. I pay about $80 a year. ...yeah, this Google thing is a total ripoff.

Re:Why not just use a web host?

[Anonymous Coward]

2 TB for $80/yr.? I guarantee your webhost is lying to you. See, they offer that to everyone with that package. But if even a few of these people started using a sizable percentage, they'd drop you. You're an incredible idiot for believing these ridiculous inflated numbers. All fly-by-night hosts do this! Why can't you people learn? God, it's sad that you probably think yourself "internet savvy" just because you have a non-Geocities web site.

Re:Why not just use a web host?

[Carbon016]

No, I realize web services oversell their space and bandwidth by a large percentage, I've just used a good chunk of it and have no problems. Oh, and I doubt Midphase is a "fly by night" hoster. ;)

Bandwidth charges are usually the killer

[Tired and Emotional]

$20 a year for 5Gig of online storage is a good rate, but how much bandwidth do you get? Usually that's the number that is unrealistically low on cheap hosting sites. At least, for example, if you want to serve video and audio files of your band. So you end up paying an arm and a leg for excess bandwidth usage if you don't watch out.

Re:Bandwidth charges are usually the killer

[Master of Transhuman]

$20/year for 5GB of storage is ridiculous these days. Most Web hosting companies offer much more for much less.

As for bandwidth, Dreamhost offers 1.5 TB for $10/month. Naturally, if everybody actually used that much, they'd get bumped to a dedicated server and charged for it. But everybody does NOT use that much. So they oversubscribe. That's common in the ISP industry. Until you become a problem for them, they'll let you use quite a bit of what they offer.

Keep in mind that 250GB these days is a disk costing under $100 - and that's RETAIL. Amortized over three years, that's what? $33/year? $3/month? With the total disks being shared by the users, and the disks purchased in bulk at OEM rates, what is the real cost to an ISP for this stuff? Peanuts! Probably $1/month tops.

And Google buys disks by the scores of thousands! They can easily justify selling other services on top of that kind of purchasing power and economies of scale. So I figure they're charging a bit more at the beginning to pay off the cost of implementing the service. I bet the prices come down later.

Forbes blew it -- Not an online storage service

[SEE]

All this is is an opportunity to buy extra space for GMail/Picassa/etc. beyond what you already get on their servers for free. It is not an online storage service like Xdrive, but an equivalent to buying Hotmail Plus.

Save your money...

[Anonymous Coward]

For much less than their offer, you can get a fully portable drive powered by USB with 250GB capacity.

See here: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools /item-details.asp?EdpNo=3201416&CatId=1277

and here: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools /item-details.asp?EdpNo=3195233&CatId=2783

Basically, about $300 or so, plus delivery, etc. I can see some use-case scenarios for online storage (particularly as TFA seems to suggest integration with other google applications), but it's super easy to plug in a USB cable and copy files onto a portable drive (no messing around like burning a DVD), plus it's fast, reusable, highly compatible, about the size of a wallet, and I know exactly who is able to see the data that I keep on it (i.e., me, and nobody else). Further, there are some free alternatives for online storage - I can't think of them off the top of my head, but, ironcially, I'm sure I could google them - plus I'm fully capable of using my Linux desktop machine at home for secure online storage with basically zero configuration other than the out-of-the box setup (think SSH/SFTP/SSHFS). I just don't see how this offering competes - not for tech-saavy individuals at least.

Sorry Google, but I'm not sold on this one.

Re:Save your money...

[Master of Transhuman]

"I just don't see how this offering competes - not for tech-saavy individuals at least."

You answered your own question. None of these plans are for techies. They're for people who can't figure out how to do all that stuff a techie would do.

A lot of small businesses and home users aren't going to be storing their stuff on their own machines (by definition, a risk) using SSH and rsync. Maybe they should be using something like Storegrid (an rdiff-backup-like client/server solution) and a Web site, but they'd need a consultant to come up with that idea. They'd never figure it out.

But they know Amazon and Google - so these services, that have economies of scale in purchasing hard drives, can easily offer a useful service to these people, even if it costs two or three times more than what a techie would spend on an equivalent solution.

The one trick pony!

[AnonymousYoda]

yawnnn.. sure it's expensive... Interestingly it points to google's strengths and weaknesses. Their huge investments in R&D, infrastructure need to have an ROI. The scale of their ad business seems to match this. However take away the ad-pony and bring in the paid software(hosted) pony and voila! Seems like Ma'ogle can't seem to match the likes of Amazon and others.. or perhaps they are being too conservative in their estimates of how many potential subscribers they can attract ?

Re: disaster recovery?

[Amouth]

that would be something worth while.. if they provided the equivlent of a real time monitored local file changes + svn on their end.. so that you could say store this folder.. and it and everything init was sent up.. as you added files it tacks them on to the list along with partial file/block changes and delettions - alot how DFS works for sever 2003..

if i could get that.. at a remote storage facility for that price.. they would have my money..

the trickto making it worth while is to make it all done in the back ground + have the ability to control and prioritize things.

BUT they will never do this - why? cause the people that want that feature set will use the space.. what they really want are people to pay and never use it.. there for it will never have the feature set you want.

Dreamhost

[Master of Transhuman]

has a "Files Forever" service where you pay I think around $2.50 per GB ONE TIME and they host the files forever. You can also sell access to those files to other people using their service.

I think $500/year for 250GB which works out to $2.00/year/GB isn't too bad, but it's annual. Dreamhost is ONCE.

MegaUpload gives you 250GB of storage for $70 for TWO years which is a mere $3/month or $35/year or a bit over one cent a month per GB.

One consideration would be risk, however - we expect Google to be around in two years. Do we know for sure that other companies would be? Of course, that is only relevant if your storage company is being used as the only store for those files - if merely used for backup, it's not relevant.

It's Google OS, silly

[byennie]

Photos, email, word processing, spreadsheets, calendar... all free.

Now, you want to jump completely on the Google OS bandwagon? Rent an online hard drive. They aren't charging you for backup disk space, they're charging you to take the plunge and adopt Google as your operating system.

Granted, it might not be 100% compelling just yet - but this has got to be the end run strategy here. Many people could get by for $10/month or less on these services, and access them with any modern computer. For occasional users, they might not even need a computer of their own any more. As a bonus, they don't have to worry as much about silly things like scanning their own files for viruses and backing them up. In a world where many people spend a minimum of $50/month on a cell phone, this is potentially a solid value.

For a typical Slashdot reader, this is probably less appealing -- "we" aren't Joe Schmo of the OS market and are quite happy piecing something way more powerful solutions ourselves. But Google dreams of Schmo's money...

cost (in)effective

[belunar]

"$75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage.' Is this too expensive for what there offering, or are you going to make use of it?"

Um...ok, using pricewatch for estimates, for $75 I can get a 250GB USB or a 320GB SATA drive, for $100 one can get a 400GB USB or a 500GB SATA drive, and for less than $500 you can get 4 500GB USB or 5 500GB SATA drives. How is this cost effective?

Re:cost (in)effective

[Master of Transhuman]

Comparing hard drive prices is not really relevant.

What's being sold here is not pure disk space, but convenience, security and brand name marketing. Most of these storage plans rely on the brand name to justify charging a premium over what a /. techie would do for an equivalent solution. And their target user will pay that much because it removes the necessary to be a techie or to think about it.

No surprise there. This is not a service targeted at IT professionals who already know how to set up an offsite server with SSH and rdiff-backup. So the cost of retail hard drives vs the far cheaper cost of the drives Google or Amazon buy isn't relevant. I'll bet Google pays FAR less for a 500-GB drive than anybody else in the business does. So by definition it's not relevant to the price they're charging for this space.

Re:cost (in)effective

[Mistah Blue]

And let's not forget this is *off-site* storage.

Re:cost (in)effective

[Master of Transhuman]

Right - ninety percent of the posters here are forgetting that entirely.

Your Retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

It should have been "for what they're offering".

(and yes, the subject line is on purpose)

So.

[LWATCDR]

I was wondering if an inexpensive dedicated hosting service might make a good back up system. Build a rackmount NAS with a VPN on it. A few SATA drives in a RAID running Linux with an AMD X2 should do just fine. Send it to the hosting service to stick in there rack and then ssh to it and connect it to your network over the VPN.
One of those Dreamhost accounts with rsync or even scp could also be just the ticket.

Too bad my (comcast) upstream sucks

[Dani Filth]

It would take over 2 months of 24/7 uploading to fill that 250GB allotment. Off site backups are critical if you're going to do it right, maybe get a couple of those firewire enclosures with a 1TB drive. Keep one in a safety deposit box, one at home, backup and rotate once a month...

To provide actual data...

[Blakey Rat]

Currently, I get a little over 250 GB from Dreamhost and I'm paying $120 a year for it. I've been a Dreamhost customer for a couple years, so I'm not sure how much a new customer gets (Dreamhost increases the storage each week), but I'm sure it's less expensive than Google's rates. I have 199 GB uploaded at the moment, which is a near-100% backup of my DVD collection (in 1-gig-per-movie MP4 format.) Dreamhost supports mounting storage as WebDAV, FTP, or rsync to transfer files. (And of course there's web hosting included.)

The problem with large amounts of storage isn't the amount of space, but the time taken to upload. It took a week to upload my movie files to Dreamhost on a medium-speed DSL connection, and it would take several solid days of downloading to get it back.

Re:To provide actual data...

[Short Circuit]

Dreamhost is awesome, except for their shared hosting. PHP-as-CGI doesn't hold up well to a Slashdotting, as I ruefully discovered. I could move Rosetta Code back to a Dreamhost account under its current load, but the spike I got in January threw pringle's load average north of 150-200.

Re:To provide actual data...

[LurkerXXX]

Yup. It's the upload/download bandwidth that's the issue with a lot of storage. My low end DSL is pretty much worthless for uploading (and not that awful much better for downloading).

Personally I just buy a spare hard drive (you can 500GB for ~$100 now, it's insane), back up everything I need to, and drop off the spare drive at my sister's house (stored in her basement) the next time I go visit her, so I'm covered if my place gets robbed or burned down.

If we all had massive bandwidth available the online deals might be good, but for most of us, 500 GB would simply take way way too long to upload or download.

Re:To provide actual data...

[adolf]

Who cares how long it takes to upload as long as it gets done before the drive crashes?

So what if it takes six weeks to upload a 100GB backup. Subsequent backups should[1] consist only of things that have changed, and should be rather fast indeed.

It doesn't even have to slow you down. Just use a router with good QoS support (for instance, anything which can run X-Wrt) and your online backup will only consume idle bandwidth... If it takes a few days to upload a few gigs of home movies, who really cares?

1: I keep automatic backups of our Gentoo mail server at work, using rsync to another Linux machine in another city and a nothing-special cable modem. It's in the realm of things that Just Fucking Works, and it's possible to restore the computer from bare metal in short order. But, rsync doesn't preserve NTFS permissions, so there seems to be no Windows-specific way of doing such a complete remote backup under Windows.

Re:To provide actual data...

[LurkerXXX]

and it's possible to restore the computer from bare metal in short order.

No, not in my case it's not. I can drive to my sisters house 70 miles away and be back with the backup drive days and days before I could retrieve the backups over my DSL line.

I care how long it takes to retrieve the data as well as how long it takes to upload it. What works for you may not work for me.

who really cares?

I do.

Re:To provide actual data...

[adolf]

Right, right.

I hear you.

That's exactly what -I- do, at least in function. To restore after a complete loss would entail both the backup server and the target machine being in the same spot at the same time, or at least the requisite hard drives. It will take either 35 or 70 miles of driving to do a bare-metal restore using my configuration, depending on which town I'm working in on the day the shit hits the fan.

I'd be foolish to do it any other way -- expecting the company's email to wait while I pedantically restore the whole machine over a 384kbps cable modem would probably mean my job.

The only real difference between what you're doing and what I'm doing is that I only have to drive moderate distances in the unlikely event of massive data loss (ie, multiple disk failure, targeted attack, or catastrophic filesystem bug), whereas you also have to drive moderate distances as part of a normal routine.

My backups are fresh. And again, I never, ever have to fuck with it.

And, granted, I do have an extra computer to maintain. But it's a nothing-special headless K6-2 box with a big SATA disk. No RAID, because it's redundant by its very existance. There's no compelling reason for it to be particularly stout; a small embedded MIPS-based machine with no moving parts would probably be a fine replacement if/when the hardware dies.

In the event that the backup server loses its mind and trashes its disk, it's easy to restore the system to a usable state -- the backup server itself is also backed up daily using the same rsync technique to the RAID array on the mail server.

Plus, for less-than-massive data loss, I can go back in time and restore selective stuff from an already-mounted, read-only NFS share, albeit slowly. (For the sake of brevity, I neglected to mention that the backup scripts use hard links to keep several days worth of complete data, plus weekly and monthly snapshots, available at all times. It's a hell of an undo button, and is a concept which should be somewhat familiar to anyone who has used a NetApps filer. Except it was much, much cheaper.)

Re:To provide actual data...

[RealBeanDip]

If anyone is interested in signing up at Dreamhost, use the following code to get $87 off one year of hosting:

BEANDIP

Yes, I'm spamming, but it is a great deal, you get a year of hosting for like $30 depending on what level you get.

Somewhat on topic: I use Dreamhost myself and they've always been excellent. They DO provide the space they say you've purchased if you actually use it (see OP), however they make no attempt to hide the fact that they totally oversell their space and bandwidth (and tell you why it's OK).

Good host, very good prices.

Re:To provide actual data...

[cthulhu11]

Dreamhost is awesome, except for their shared hosting Um, shared hosting is what Dreamhost *does*. PHP-as-CGI doesn't hold up well to a Slashdotting, as I ruefully discovered Wasn't this article about storage, not application hosting?

Re:To provide actual data...

[Short Circuit]

I wasn't the one to originally bring up Dreamhost...

Re:To provide actual data...

[Kalriath]

If anyone is interested in signing up at Dreamhost, use the following code to get $87 off one year of hosting: Or don't, because he makes a commission if you do that.

It's not that expensive, and it's worth paying a bit more to stop these people who plug Dreamhost-with-referral-links in any relevant story from making any money.

Re:To provide actual data...

[Anonymous Coward]

and drop off the spare drive at my sister's house (stored in her basement) the next time I go visit her

Ha! I really doubt data preservation is the first thing on your mind when you pop over to your sister's house for some quick incestuous sex to relieve your sexual frustration.

Buy a new hard drive.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get a 150GB disk for a little under $55 USD now. Why pay 200 a year when you can spend less than a $100, and just set up a simple FTP. I'm sure there download speeds are probably a lot quicker than your local internet service provider's is, but seriously, a few extra 100kbs for over $200 a year? Screw that.

Far too expensive

[theolein]

My god, even Apple, of all things, is cheaper than this. Microsoft, you listening? you can get one on Google pretty easily here, just undercut the bastards by 40%.

It's expensive... but...

[RudeIota]

Working with Google-apps only aside, what is it worth to YOU to have your data stored in a remote facility with multiple backups?

To me, it isn't worth that much; however, for some of you, this may be well worth it. Data loss isn't just caused by viruses, stupid users and wheezing drives - it is also caused by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, fires etc...

And despite the "only for Google apps" uses, I think the handful of companies and schools that are probably utilizing Google apps will appreciate the extra storage space.

No thanks..

[AndrewNeo]

My online hosting service gives us 300gb of space and 300gb of transfer a month, and we're paying like $7.95/mo. This is for web-hosting, mind you. They provide FTP, WebDAV, and SSH (therefore sftp) so I don't see why, other than assured data redundancy, I wouldn't pay less for more.

Horriblely Written Article

[smitth1276]

They used more words, and described what Google is doing less effectively. From Google's official blog:

When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB.

When you go to the official storage management page, the first thing it says is, "Each Google service offers you some free storage.", and then gives you a nice visual representation of how much you have used.

Re:Horriblely Written Article

[Skim123]

Previously GMail's disk quota was slowly increasing over time. I assume that now that they have entered the business of selling online disk space, such increases are now a thing of the past?

Re:Horriblely Written Article

[DragonWriter]

Previously GMail's disk quota was slowly increasing over time. I assume that now that they have entered the business of selling online disk space, such increases are now a thing of the past?

Apparently not (at least not yet): the "Lots of space" counter on the login page is still counting up.

Re:How is it practical to businsses or the consume

[Master of Transhuman]

Warning, warning, Grammar Nazi attack imminent! Homeland Security Alert Level is Red!

"The only people with that much patients"

That's "patience"!

Jokes aside, I can see online backup of this sort being used by very small companies. I agree, they would be better off dumping it all on an external drive and storing it in a safe deposit box - but some people don't like to do that much work when they can automate a solution like this for what is not terribly a lot of money per year. For most even small companies, $500/year not to have to think about 250GB of backup storage is cheap. Not brilliant, but a lot of small companies would go for it.

Also, this is useful for home users with the same attitude - money but not work. There are cheaper and more flexible alternatives as others have mentioned. Ten bucks a month for a Web site with a couple hundred gigabytes of storage space is easy to find these days. Still, they have to think about it. Most of these plans offer a desktop application that handles the complexity for you.

As to the security component, most of these plans offer some sort of encryption which in some cases is purely local to and controlled by the client which pretty much eliminates the security issue. And of course, this is purely for archival storage or remote access - nobody would use these services for primary storage.

So yeah, Google's plan is "okay" - not "great" or the only alternative. It makes sense for them to get into the game given their economies of scale - just like Amazon did with their S3 service. If you buy scores of thousands of hard drives at a time, why not use that purchasing power to sell other services based on that economy of scale?

Rrrrrrright

[JamesRose]

So, $500 per 250gigs, so I could buy a PC with 8 times that capacity easily for the same price- but that aside (cos online storage is another ballpark)

Lets look at your options, no added features, only 250gigs and google (I don't trust a corporation that would be handling the majority of searches, a large portion of e-mail, and now all you data! No thanks!
Or Dreamhost- Full web server features including SSH and cron- $240 for 291.2gb (Increasing by 2gb weekly) and 2.91tb transfer- a free domain name, and 12000 e-mail addresses at that domain.

I'm sorry, but with all the bulk storage google needs, you would have thought they were not only cost effective, but reliable and know what they're doing... oh well.

Re:How is it practical to businsses or the consume

[Master of Transhuman]

Well, obviously upload speeds are an issue. Some storage plans let you send them a hard drive full of stuff and they just move it into your account. That's practical.

OTOH, nobody says you have to upload all your stuff all at once. Set up a plan, push a little bit up overnight every night. Eventually it's done and all you have to worry about is the incremental uploads - again, do them at night.

Trying to upload 250GB all at once at even 1.5Mbps is brain dead.

And only cheaper if you don't count bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Since S3 charges you for upload and download, you have to factor that in. At the very least factor in the uploading cost. I use S3, it's reasonably priced for a stable, fast off-site backup.

500 gigs at Fry's for $120 (USB 2.0/Firewire)

[Wingfat]

so if i can get an external 500 gig for $120 then why would i pay $250 a year for less storage.. i get the whole back up thing they would be doing, but any self respecting IT person would back up their own hard drives often enough. I have a SafeDeposit box (I work for a bank) for free so i keep all my back ups in there. That box it is in is fire proof.

not that expensive

[simontek2]

You guys keep thinking of yourselves, with external drives and portability. But what happens when you want to share work with someone overseas? Are you going to mail them that drive? Hell even across the state.

[offtopic] Sonic recently turned 16

[empaler]

FTW!
http://digg.com/celebrity/Yay_It_s_Sonic_the_Hedge hog_s_birthday

Comparing Google Purchased Storage with Amazon S3

[ibib]

If you can use Google Purchased Storage as an online backup folder, it will be much cheaper than using Amazon S3. For example:

6 GB of storage every month and 6 GB of inbound traffic for making the backup from your computer and say about 1 GB of transfer for retrieving some important files, Google asks for $20.00 a year while Amazon charges you $27.60.

A similar calculation for using 100 GB of data for backup, 100 GB of inbound transfer each month and 10 GB of retrieved files; Google = $250.00, Amazon = $321,60.

I think it is too early to say if the Google option actually is a good way of backing up data. I have a similar option with the web host I am using, they offer a service to upload files "forever", where you pay a one time fee depending of the size of the file when you upload it (and then download it). I have a feeling that Google PS can be a good backup option for a lot of people (non-geeks and some geeks).

Re:Comparing Google Purchased Storage with Amazon

[MushMouth]

uh, do you instantly put 6 gigs on? Do you need to pay up front for future growth? It seems like you have some poor assumptions of real world use. Also since thie Google service only interoperates with google apps, you should instead consider the use of S3 with EC2, which does not induce bandwidth charges.

my 2 cents

[digitalsushi]

I pay rsync.net about 6 bucks a month, educational discount at half off, for 6 gigs of space on their servers. I'm in the USA, the server is in Europe, and it's then copied to another continent (probably the USA again... somewhere not in my apartment.) Even at half off, I'm paying rsync.net a lot more than the google thing costs. And the google thing sounds expensive to most people.

Most people here think they can whip together some one-task server with a software raid to back their data up. In fact, many of us do this. But out of the set of us that can manage this, what portion of us are storing that data locally? And how many are checking that the backups are working properly? How many of us have actually restored to verify we know exactly what we're doing? I've been a linux admin for 8 years, and I could still see myself making an error that would cost me all my data. All the people who haven't ever done a backup server and think they're just going to whip together a solution some weekend are people playing a very risky game. Yeah yeah, I hear you saying, "this guy thinks I'm a moron, or thinks he's so smart"- listen, I'm just saying, until you've tested something new from scratch a couple times, you're risking your files to fate.

Now, take the google thing. Yeah, they're gonna mine it. Just for advertising eyeballs, but they're gonna do it. Do you care? Should you? That's not relevant to this. What IS relevant is that they're going to back your data up better than your home-rig will. Yeah, yours is faster and bigger. But what happens when you forget to cron the backup? Or assume a symlink got tarred? Or fat-finger the restore and lose your set? Or, heaven forbid, you have a fire? What if you lost your backups with your source in the same physical accident? Or theft?

And then you'd kick yourself for not having at least that 50 megabytes of stuff you actually can't re-download. A photo of your first girlfriend from high school. An email from an old friend that died. Stuff that had only those two copies, and you watched them both unlink from the disk before you could stop the delete command. Whoops.

Now, if you dont want them mining it, get a host like rsync.net. Nah, I dont work for them. They're awesome only in that they delivered what I paid for. They're not one of those "unlimited until we say so" shops, and the data always gets through. They're a small shop and the guys there love support. Anyways, I'm not saying they're the ones for sure- there are plenty of other places. I just wanted the rsync support. I sleep just a little easier knowing that, however stupid I end up being, some of my stuff exists somewhere smarter than I can accidentally destroy.

So there you have it. I'm no guru, just an average, run of the mill professional linux admin, who trusts a service provider that does backups for a living better than I can do myself at my own home. The end.

PATRIOT ACT COMPLIANT?

[MilesNaismith]

Let's see I can pay to have my files stored somewhere that any Federal employee can leaf through anytime they like. No thanks!

Haha...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can find hard drives which cost less than the storage that Google advertise. I'm sure some will fall for it...insensitive clods!

If it's just the space, you can get more, cheaper.

[mxs]

Let's knock out the obvious ones first, shall we ?

http://www.megaupload.com/ has one offering, 250gbyte. Prepaid for one year it's 50 Euros (or whatever their site says for the US locale). That's 70 bucks. You /can/ use this as a storage-only service, but of course you can also use it for distribution and such -- no transfer limits. Rapidshare.com has similar offerings (with "unlimited" storage but a 5gbyte/day cap) at similar prices. Both of these rely heavily on customers infringing copyrights, so it's anyone's guess how long they'll stay around. Both also use somewhat nonstandard file deposit and file delivery methods. There are countless others in that market (oxedion, mediafire, upfile, rs.de, filefront, etc., all with varying foci).

The regular webhosting market has things like this to offer as well. http://www.dreamhost.com/ : The cheapest plan, at one year prepayment, would be around 120 bucks and offer 145gb of space. I say would since you can use their promo codes (check the forums) to almost triple the space or drop the price to a lot less. So that's 400 gb of storage, a couple terabytes of transfer a month, and some processing power to boot (WebDAV/FTP/SFTP/SCP/rsync/etc. are all possible). I imagine competitors to DH will have similar offerings space-wise. We're looking at around a fourth the price for almost double the storage space. Don't you dare yell "overselling" -- Google does, too.

If you can be bothered with some cumbersome setup (to laypeople, anyway), Amazon S3 will get you storage space for $0.15/gb/month, plus traffic ($0.18/gb). If you actually use 250gb, the price will be comparable to Google for storage alone (i.e. no transfers other than the initial incoming transfer); the difference is that you get charged by the byte, not in large pre-paid packages. If you use 1gb and transfer it twice, you pay $0.51 that month. Also consider that if you use less than the 250gb Google offering, you're probably get away cheaper (since the smaller Google plans are comparatively more expensive while Amazon's offering exhibits a linear price curve over the amount of storage used).

The value Google's space has is probably the integration with its applications -- Picasa, for instance, lacks decent online functionality using standard protocols -- and Google will probably deliver GREAT online functionality with their own service.

If all you really need is a foolproof backup, open up an FTP and let the world mirror it. I wonder who would do such a thing ...

i don't think i like it

[um... Lucas]

Unless they put the storage business in a separate subsidiary who's revenue is dependent only on subscriber fees. Google's really really gotten me paranoid in their quest to know everything that there is to know about the interests of its users, so they (we) can all be tagged into their databases somewhere and have that information used for who knows what. I don't feel that i have anything special that needs hiding, but i still don't feel entirely secure with one relatively young entity with no track record defending it's users privacy amassing so much data about us. You don't even need to use Google to end up in their databases, as there's google ad boxes splashed just about everywhere these days. Yes, I clear my cookies on a constant basis, but A) what good is that when i'm always coming from the same IP address and B) what good is it to the millions of people (my mom included) that have no idea what a cookie even is?

And now, they want me to pay them to store my documents, music, etc? I'll have to read the TOS agreement, but i somehow believe that by signing up, i'll end up paying them for the right to let them scour every last thing i upload, all in hopes of delievering more "targeted advertising" to me.

No thanks....

end of paranoid anti-google rant.

Re: disaster recovery?

[cbreaker]

I guess so, but generally speaking, my house isn't on fire and if it did go up in flames, I'd probably be less concerned about some powerpoint presentation and more concerned about all my stuff that just got destroyed.

If I'm out on a business trip and there's some really important documents I need, I'll carry them on a CD or USB Flash drive as well as the notebook drive. I keep semi-regular backups of my important data at a relatives' house, and I have all my files available online via my Cable modem. (I actually take this another step further, by using DFS Replication to replicate a 400GB share to two friends' houses over a VPN. This isn't a solution for many people, though.)

I tend to trust my own system more then an online service like this, even if it is Google. Besides, like you said, it can end up being very inconvenient to access online data if it's of any significant size, and if you're looking for just disaster recovery, there's online solutions for that that are probably a lot more practical then trying to manage local and remote files yourself.

It all depends on what you need it for, but I can't imagine that storing 200+ GB on an Internet file storage service will ever be truly practical until we get much faster internet connections.

Unlimited Data Backup: US$8 / month

[saintory]

How about Unlimited Data Backup for US$79.99 annually?

This is a lot like buying a hosting account

[Cafe Alpha]

Godaddy web hosting comes with storage for a similar price, but also gives you guaranteed bandwidth and other extras..

Free version?

[Kugrian]

Where's the free version? Plaster ads all over it - I don't care.

That may be a bit much for this service.

[wildman6801]

I currently use Mozy for my backup. http://www.mozy.com/ You get unlimited storage for the same cost as their mid level storage. About $50 a year. The only problem with Mozy is that it only works with PC or MAC no linux. But that is okay for most users. I can see that the future of online storage being very viable but it comes down to the cost. That is what the main problem is with today. Along with of course slow upload speed with many high speed internet connections.

Ow, ow. Ow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaaaaaaaaagh :(

I think a piece of my brain just jumped out of my ear, ran outside and is currently sitting in the street in hopes of ending it all.

Re:How is it practical to businsses or the consume

[pavera]

or just buy a 500GB external HD copy all your stuff over in about 20 minutes, and be done with it...

Includes a FREE "bandwidth quota exceeded" banner

[Nicolas MONNET]

I find $99 quite excessive considering the only things I've seen on a .Mac blog are the "bandwidth exceeded" banner because it was linked in from Digg or Boingboing.

What's the point, then?

If you want raw storage and unlimited bandwidth, Proxad offers dedicated boxes with 160G of storage, complete administrator access for 30 EUR a month. No filtering/shaping whatsoever, 100Mbps ethernet connectivity per box. They have plenty of bandwidth, being a major ISP that basically only offers (unthrottled, unmetered, unshaped) 28 Mbps ADSL links. I don't think you can order this directly from the US, but I believe there's 3rd party services that resell it. I use one of those boxes to download Democracy Now's torrents, and I routinely reach 3MBps (that's megaBytes) of upload speed.

Damn inflation

[Anonymous Coward]

I can remember when you could get a pair of shoes, a blowjob and still have enough change from a hundred bucks for a night out!

Encryption

[Poromenos1]

"It looks like you uploaded some random data! Well, our random number generator is better!"

Violating terms of usage

[Per Abrahamsen]

You don't want to do that if access to the data is important to you.

mount the drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I mount this Google HDD in the sky as a drive in linux? Reason I ask is because I have hundreds of gigabytes of FLAC archives which I would like to backup. In addition to that I would like to play those files directly from the Google HDD in the sky and bypass my NAS.

Wish there was a Google Spellcheck

[thedrx]

Is this too expensive for what there offering, or are you going to make use of it?

Come on, English is not my primary language and it hurts me to see this.

Use Mozy for online backup

[master811]

If you want good on-line backup, use www.mozy.com $55 for 1 yr or $5 per month, and this is for UNLIMITED storage and they give you up to 2GB for free, if you just wanna try it out. Plus its all encrypted before it even leaves your PC (you can even choose your OWN encryption key or they provide one) so you know whatever you backup will be safe. They also have a mac client in beta (for those that don't want to use .Mac)

Re:my 2 cents - rsync.net +++

[enselsharon]

I am also a customer of rsync.net, and will be so forever. The cost is higher (although at the top end of their quantity discounts, its not ridiculous) and it is worth it, without question.

Does google or amazon give you this:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

or even this:

http://www.rsync.net/philosophy.html

The bottom line is, I don't want people using my personal information, I don't want them parsing my data and usage patterns, and I don't want them bowing down to law enforcement as a matter of course. I just want a plain old unix filesystem that I can do whatever I want with, and a phone number to talk to a real person when I need to.

And I'll pay a lot for that.

dot5: 300GB $60/year

[walterbyrd]

http://dot5hosting.com/

BTW: I absolutely do not recommend dot5 as a web-hosting service. But, if you just want a lot of online storage. . . .

Comparison

[Kuvter]

Price Comparison
I have web hosting through globat.com currently and they give me 1000 GB Web Hosting Space + Free Domain for 4.44/mo (granted it's on special right now). So that's just under $54/year for 1Tb of storage, but I'm limited to 1TB Data Transfer per month. In comparison I'd get between 6 and 25GB storage from Google for that cost. Having unlimited transfer rate to and from that storage would definitely increase the value of it, whether they are offer that might be found in RFTA, but it still seems too costly.

Online vs. Offline
Having data saved online, with access to it anywhere, sounds like a good idea. If I went to a friend's house I could just log onto my storage and stream music through their music player, and not have to lug CDs around. Also if they offered data security, like backups, so my data wouldn't be lost, that'd be a plus as well. My house could flood or burn down and I'd still have all my data safe, even though my computer died. Though the security issues of private data online is another thing that could me argued; I'm going to argue for having online storage, even if it's only for backup, but at this price rate I'll pass until it's more competitive with physical storage.

Twice the price of Hostgator.com

[mattr]

I've been agonizing over a new hosting company having had a terrible VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider.
Based on online reviews, chat/mail with ISPs and review site owners, and threads in the Perl Catalyst mailing list, I've decided the best solution is to pick up a shared account at HostGator.com just for cheap storage and my family's sites (they seem to have very good reviews on webhostingunleashed too), plus a separate VPS at a fanatical company - I'm choosing between two but I don't want to mention them here, if you must know join the list.

Anyway, the summary says "Google $250/yr for 100GB of storage" and this actually compares with HostGator, which has two packages comparable to (actually a little cheaper than) Google. Their Baby package is 100GB disk, 1TB bandwidth, and $9.95/month. Well at $10 that would be $120 but the first month is free with a coupon (several are listed at webhostingunleashed) so even if they don't give a yearly discount (maybe they do?) it's $110/year. AND you get a shared web account, unlimited domains, etc.. Now I don't know if they have RAID, or guarantee anything particularly, but I think Google is WAY off course with this. It might be worth it if they absolutely guarantee your data and connectivity. But I just can't see it if Google is charging double for just a hard disk.

Incidentally I just bought a HostGator account last night to quickly move data off a dying server and later spend time setting up a VPS linux server where I have root.

Now if Google would give me a lifetime VPS corral where I can put VPS images with guaranteed connectivity, RAID, and everything a managed provider would give me, I would move to them in a heartbeat. I know they have that sort of thing for their in-house servers, it's possible. But whether they can do it for the price some small VPS companies are managing to do it at, that's a good question. I'd rather see them federate with those guys than putting them out of business, anyway the node and slice guys if you know who they are seem to put a lot of energy into interfaces and service. Google doesn't have a ton of service reps, and developers are running fast away from rotten ISPs that say they are giving one thing but have maybe 1 guy per shift with any competency at all. What Google should do is make a way for U.S. sysadmins to get good jobs and provide high quality service. It's a no-brainer, they just need to apply their knowhow and not hire people in India or if they do, hire the ones who are professionally trained and in touch with the U.S. side 24x7 so that you don't end up getting shuttled around. That (I know from their top admin) is what killed my last ISP.

Too much for space

[pro_virus]

It is selling at the price of an external drive. So, it's really not interesting... but for them!

This is useless

[hyynes]

My upload speed is terrible (256k). How am I supposed to use 250GB of online storage at all?

Don't try to be an smart ass.

[jotaeleemeese]

It takes a domestic accident (think about one, you can't be that unimaginative) to wipe out your "backup".

With Google such happening is highly unlikely.

Gdrive is no comparison with DriveHQ.com

[sam-2007]

I have been a happy DriveHQ user for almost 2 years. Their service is great! All GDrive features are long available and better on DriveHQ.com. Visit www.drivehq.com and watch the demo. # Backup. DriveHQ Online Backup works great. It has a lot of high-end features, much better than GDrive, including versioning, scheduled backup, encrypted storage, compressed upload, incremental backup and resuming, etc. # Sync. DriveHQ FileManager can sync multiple PCs, multiple user accounts. # VPN-less access. You can access your data from anywhere using a web browser, any FTP client, or DriveHQ Client software, or SMTP/POP3 email with Outlook! # Collaborate. DriveHQ Group Account service is a true enterprise class collaboration platform. You can easily share folders to different people with different access rights. DriveHQ Group Account owner / admin can create/manage/delete sub-accounts. # Disconnected access. On the plane? VPN broken? All your files are still accessible as DriveHQ FileManager can cache the data for offline access! DriveHQ even offers SMTP/POP3 emails for offline Outlook access with unlimited email storage! DriveHQ offers basic service for free. So why the wait? Sign up at: http://www.drivehq.com/?refID=2925384