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

Old new: It's called gmail

[Bomarc]

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

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?

[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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.