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

Cheaper? Just trying to be relevant

[vk2]

Between backblaze b2 and wasabi.com using duplicity software - only the non-technical folks will fall for this.

Re:Cheaper? Just trying to be relevant

[war4peace]

I'm using Backblaze B2 for my local data backup and sync, but at the same time I am using Google's Docs, Sheets and mail with some attachments. I am currently using 13 GB out of 15 and I'm considering upgrading to the next tier.

Give us tour data

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll make it cheaper for you to be spied on

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.

[pecosdave]

Many years ago before the term "cloud" was a buzz word I used my home Internet connection combined with Webmin and Usermin to have my own, easy to use, remote storage. This was before USB flash drives were even a thing.

If it weren't for the fact ISP's tend to like to combat home hosting through port blocking these days (even if I do know how to get around it), I think I would be doing that again. I'm about to get a new ISP, we'll see.

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

[Junta]

In this specific scenario, you aren't paying for disk space, you are paying for them to have responsibility for keeping the data available, and having it at a persistently accessible location. That means some chunk of electricity, network connectivity, and costs associated with replacing storage capacity, and various other requirements. In terms of paying for a decade, these providers are uncomfortable with the commitment of the service being available as the customer would like it more than a year out or so, which of course should be a warning flag that something may cause you to want to get a copy of *all* your data, and if you have not proactively been doing so, that may be impossible to grab your 6TB of whatever in time to react to whatever Google thing you don't like.

Of course, if you were of the mind to do it yourself with hard drives, you would probably want the primary live copy of the data and two offline copies (one you take to work and stick in your desk, one that might be at home being backed up, cycling between the two. Of course such a scheme would be about $300 for 4 TB right now and it would take 15 months to be cheaper than using Wasabi, but egress is much easier. It is however a pretty technical solution out of reach of a lot of folks.

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.

[pecosdave]

I've been playing with. Syncthing. I'm seriously thinking about using it to make an offsite backup, already my documents are synced between my laptop and desktop using it, I'm pretty sure it would work if I decided to "go big" with it.

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

[swillden]

$10 a month is $120 per year. Since hard drive storage only costs about $25 per TB to actually buy one of those 2 TB, 3 TB, or bigger drives, they break even on the storage costs at about 5 months.

You mean 12 months. A 2TB drive costs $60, but since you aren't an idiot you don't buy just one, you buy two because you need one copy offsite. So you back up locally to one of them, then periodically run over to your mom's house (or wherever you're storing your offsite copy) and swap them. I'm assuming you don't need to include any allowance for your time because you're good and visit your mom regularly anyway. And I'm assuming you are methodical and not lazy and so always remember to do this drive swapping.

Personally, $100 per year (including the discount for paying annually instead of monthly), makes perfect sense for me. That's without even considering electricity or maintenance (drives are low maintenance until they fail).

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.

Next stop ... G Suite?

[Mr_Silver]

It would be nice if they looked at their G Suite pricing for people who simply want a couple of email addresses hanging from their own domain. Right now, if you have your own domain, Google assumes you're a business and charges accordingly.

Here in the UK 3.30 GBP/user/month comes to near 198 GBP (~$270) per year for 5 family members which is extremely expensive! Even more so when you realise that, because it's family, all you really want is the same functionality that normal Gmail users get.