Google Will Make Its Paid Storage Plans Cheaper (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report:Google is rolling out new changes to its storage plans that include a new, low-cost storage plan and half off the price of its 2TB storage option, the company announced today. It's also converting all Google Drive paid storage plans to Google One, perhaps in part because you'll now have one-tap access to Google's live customer service.

Google One will get a new $2.99 a month option that gets you 200GB of storage. The 2TB plan, which usually costs $19.99 per month, will now cost $9.99 a month. Finally, the 1TB plan that costs $9.99 a month is getting removed. The other plans for 10, 20, or 30TB won't see any changes.

Comments

It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pecosdave]

If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[darkain]

The counter argument is that it isn't JUST storage though. Add in the power and maintenance costs. Add in the data redundancy/resiliency. Add in the ability to easily share the content stored on GDrive with others. If you only look at the cost from just a raw storage standpoint, yes local storage is cheaper. But as soon as your single drive dies, you lose everything. GDrive, AWS S3, BackBlaze, etc all use redundant storage with file chunks spread across multiple disks in multiple servers across multiple full racks. Now, if that isn't worth something to you, that's perfectly fine and you're more than welcome to purchase your own local storage. But if you care are off-site copies of content stored in a redundant fashion, these services are great.

As an FYI, one of my tasks was to help rebuild a business after they had a 100% total loss of all local computer and server systems after a fire destroyed their building. Using one of these "expensive" cloud providers, I was able to simply have them purchase a new server, log into their cloud account, and re-sync all of their content. Their new servers were already up and running long before they even had the office rebuilt and occupied. In this particular instance, remote storage was invaluable to the business.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[MightyYar]

I formerly used a second hard drive as my sole backup. Lightning hit nearby and took out both hard drives - luckily between the two hard drives I was able to recover most of the files.

A second incident took out both hard drives when a mount failed and the top drive fell on to the lower drive.

You can dismiss me as a moron, or you can use my hard-won experience - no skin off my back. The point is now I make sure I have a backup at a separate geographic location, and now I understand why that is considered best practice.