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1GB of Google Drive Storage Now Costs Only $0.02 Per Month
SmartAboutThings writes "Up until today, I always had the impression that cloud storage was pretty expensive and I'm sure that many will agree with me. It's a good thing that some bright minds over at Google have the same impressions as they now have drastically discounted the monthly storage plans on Google Drive. The new monthly storage plans and their previous prices are as follows: $1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99), and $99.99 for 10TB.The 2 dollar plan per month means that the price for a gigabyte gets down to an incredibly low price of only two cents per month."
...with the company that specializes in data mining!
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
And you can use it anywhere. And it has USB 3.0 speed. And it won't be data mined by Google.
Just upload encrypted filesystem containers and go about your business.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
How much does it cost you to get that terabytes worth of data from your local computer to Google Drive?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'm curious, how much does it cost to run a Slashvertisement like this? I'm putting together a marketing plan and want to see if it fits within my budget.
I've always been wondering why no Google-equivalent (or Facebook, or Twitter, or Amazon, for that matter) came out of Europe. Not every one is comfortable storing personal or business data on servers in the US.
A 4TB drive is under 200 USD from several vendors. That is only $.05/GB. So, at 0.24/yr. This is 5..10X more expensive than commercial off the shelf home drive space assuming you have to buy a new drive every 1-2 years. That time figure is pretty conservative.
So, yeah, you maybe cloud storage gives you some replication, and the syncing of that replication costs some amount of money for bandwidth. How much extra that reliability costs really depends on the data dynamics, though and isn't as easy to estimate.
Also, 5..10X more is just about the ratio of SSD storage to magnetic disks. SSD is considered "relatively expensive storage" by most people I know.
The NSA has an even better deal. The only price you pay for storage of all of your data is your freedom.
If you're looking for long-term archival storage, Amazon Glacier is a pretty good deal at a $0.01/GB. I backed a few hundred GB's of data there and it's only costing me a few dollars/month. Restores will cost money, but if my house burns down and I lose my NAS + backups, I won't mind paying them a few hundred dollars to restore my data to a hard drive and ship it to me. Does Google Drive provide a way to ship your data on a hard drive? It would take me days or weeks to download data over my currrent internet connection (assuming I don't hit my ISP's data cap)
10TB for $99 a month isn't too terrible for a backup if you value your data enough to do so.
That's $1200 a year. For the same $1200 you can buy a NAS box of equal or greater capacity that's yours and doesn't require monthly payments.
I'm worst than that, I make randomly-written files, compress them to ZIP, compress them again in RAR, put that inside a GZ, ROT13 the whole thing and then encrypt it.
And for the cherry on top, I name the file "confidential_data.dmg" before uploading it.
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Now, if only they would make a Linux client. Then, I might use it. Until then, Dropbox all the way!
But that NAS is likely sitting at your location, which means if it gets burned down by insane meth heads or swallowed by a sinkhole, you're good and screwed.
For my business, I use DFS that replicates our shared drives at all three locations, so I feel fairly confident that an almost up-to-date mirror of the data is being held at two other locations, all of which are separated by a lot of miles. Coupled with offsite backup, I feel the business data is secure.
At the moment my personal data is on Dropbox, with my absolutely confidential data in a Truecrypt container. Still, Dropbox is kind of expensive for the 7 or 8gb of data I'd like to store, so I will definitely be considering Google's offering. Since both work the same, at least for the PC versions, in that each computer has a full copy of the data, if Google goes offline or pulls the plug, I still have my multiple copies sitting around.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Just upload encrypted filesystem containers and go about your business.
Truecrypt containers are nice, but the downside is that the entire container has to be re-uploaded every time something inside it is changed. Good argument for having multiple small containers, but then it's a bit of a shell game figuring out where your data is...
If you're looking for file-by-file encryption, try AxCrypt. It can bulk encrypt / decrypt files, apply strong encryption, and securely shreds the temporaries once you close up a file you opened for whatever reason. And it's also open source ;)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Dropbox still has one key feature that Google Drive can't figure out: incremental updates. That means that small changes in big files do not require the entire file to be uploaded again. IN your case, a large Truecrypt continuer will change frequently (or parts thereof). Dropbox won't blink an eye when it does delta change updates. Google Drive will upload the WHOLE thing once again. If you're using truecrypt, dropbox is your only practical choice.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity