Google Near Launch of Cloud-Storage Service

I'd like the Google Drive to back-up my Android apps, images, videos, settings, Contacts, passwords and other data, so when I change phones or install a custom ROM, I can restore my phone 100%. They already do this with Chrome. I'd like to be able to do the same with Android.

Can you imagine something going wrong with your account and trying to contact Google support?

I trust Dropbox way more than Google. They know what customer service means. Google can't even spell it. They are too proud and addicted to their power.

Google has Big Table right? But do they have a distributed storage mechanism on par with S3? I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.

Dropbox is a terrific product. Simple for absolutely anyone to use, it does one thing and does it perfectly well. But I think Dropbox as a company is indeed vulnerable. They have only the one product, as perfect as it is, and no hold on their customers. If a Dropbox clone were to appear tomorrow, transferring your files is a matter of minutes if not seconds. Thus they're posed for fierce price competition, with fast-dropping profit margins. So the name of the game will be added-value services - services that would potentially "lock-in" customers and make it harder to switch. Unfortunately, Google seems better posed for such services, but I, for one, will stick with Dropbox for now, simply because I don't want to give Google access to so much of my data (it's quite enough that they keep all my e-mail).

If you pay for space upgrades then that applies to all services. I'm fairly sure the Gmail space system was related to how they stored the data, as they have the always increasing ticker. Either that or it is/was a marketing ploy.

Google can index and search your emails in GMail, and serve you ad. The more free storage the more emails to index. Pictures are difficult to parse and index. It's less a profit center for them.

There are other costs you need to consider such as data transfer, the usage patterns of your private inbox is different from a public album.

Didn't you answer your own question? They know most gmail users won't use more than 1GB so it's good for marketing to offer 8GB and financially they won't waste too much money as most people won't use those 8GB. With picasa however, that limit would probably be reached quickly by most or many so it's safer for them to offer less there.

Photos less than 2048x2048 in dimensions don't count towards the free limit since Google+ launched. I have always resized my photos to 1600px wide, and now my Picasa usage is very low.

1) Because typical user behavior for email will require megs, not gigs. I've used apps for my business for five years running and only barely crest a gig.

2) Because Gmail's main economic contribution to Google isn't the advertising, it is in signing people up for Google accounts, just like Yahoo Mail's main purpose is to stickily draw people to the Yahoo front page. After you're logged in on Google, your rate of searching goes up, compared to otherwise demographically similar people who are not logged in. (Same if you use Chrome or the Google toolbar, by the way.) Google likes when you search because Google is a multinational advertising company and about two thirds of their inventory by revenues is on their own search result pages.

3) Separately from the totally rational reasons to prefer Gmail (a strategically important service with negligible marginal costs) over Picasa (a strategically marginal service with relatively high marginal costs), Google is also a big multinational corporation, and internal politics still happen there. There is a political angle to any project getting additional resources. Picasa is not politically favored compared to, I don't know, that I-can't-believe-its-not-Facebook that they launched recently.

Aside from the other reasons mentioned here, email compresses fairly well so 8GB of email could end up using less disk than 1GB of photos (which are already compressed).

Wow! This comment prompted me to check how much of my gmail storage I am using, and it made me realize that my google account through Cornell gives me 25GB of storage. Oh how I wish I could use this 25GB as cloud storage.

http://i.imgur.com/ixlZ6.png

I think your use case is not universal. I regularly reach 80% - 90% and so do my peers. We have to regularly use findbigmail and smart-personally-defined filters to delete big and unnecessary mails.

Gmail is used as a collaboration as well as backup tool by at least a few of us. What it means is that we often tend to many attachments exceeding 10MB - and multiple versions of them. Not the most optimal usage I know, but it is very quick and convenient most users (even the not-so-technically proficient ones) are able to use it with ease.

Images can't really be compressed while emails easily can. That Even if you reached 8GB of text that isn't how much storage you're taking up on their servers.

Google App Engine offers 6GB for free, not exactly ridiculously large.

..is this a rhetorical question?

See the byline in http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/02/introducing-chrome-for-an... - Sundar Pichai is "SVP, Chrome and Apps".

Yes, it's code for a source who is "on background" or of similar attribution status. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_sourcing under "Speaking terms."

If you truly have a privacy concern just throw a TrueCrypt file store inside of your cloud storage. I do this already in dropbox and it works well.