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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?"
Well, that about does it for comments here.
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See: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Also, even assuming that Google's new service is:
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?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Sigh.
Here we go again, wielding the language of Shakespeare with all the delicate sensitivity and purpose of a surgeon wielding a cosh.
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.
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.
Marcin
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.
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).
The Forbes article didn't link to it, so here's the official announcement from Google:
- to-get-more-storage.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/simple-way
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.
You could, you know, encrypt your data using something like PGP. There's also an older free version of PGP here.
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.
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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer. py?answer=65430
"$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?
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.
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"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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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.
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.
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.
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Let's knock out the obvious ones first, shall we ?
/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).
...
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
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