Save more with Google Drive
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time?
Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet.
Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are the ones that are visibly on the chopping block. You can see their agony from space.
Google Groups used to be huge, now to get to them you must click Apps -> More -> Even more from Google -> Scroll to the bottom of the page. It's 5th last. I expect them to announce it read-only within 2 years and totally closed within 5.
Google Finance was once the best stock screener and data-mine. Back in the day it was the only free service with real-time stock update. Google was proud to announce that and it was amazing. Today it still uses Flash, the stock screener is broken, portfolio's can barely be rearranged.
What guarantee do we have here? Why should I be more comfortable letting Google back up my stuff instead of Dropbox? I need a strong, material answer from Google on this question long before a few dollar bills become the important matter of distinction.
~~~
I'm sorry if I come off as scaremongering. The point I'm trying to make is that most people who want their data backed-up well, for a long time, probably care less about the exact dollar amount and more about (perceived) longevity of the service. Sometimes, Google exits markets for reasons that are unclear to many, and it needs to tangibly remedy that perception.
As a counterpoint to that, Dropbox might not exist in 5 years. Google most likely will.
Basically, there is no answer here that guarantees the future of your cloud storage. It's useful to access your files from multiple locations, but using it for long term file archival seems like asking for disappointment (as well as being a neat way of throwing money into the sky).
I don't see how that's a hard and fast rule. File storage is Dropbox's only business line - if it fails, they're gone. If it helps their other concerns (Gmail, Google Apps) Google can prop up Drive even if its unprofitable.
Depends.
Google might decide to stop supporting it because they want to focus on something else and DropBox might decide to pivot because they can no longer make enough money compared to the costs they incur (especially as Google is slowly squeezing them out of the market with the kind of price slashing we are currently discussing).
Nobody can claim with certainty which of Google or DropBox is more likely to support their product the longest.
This announcement just made that significantly cheaper, and there's opportunity here for a "cloud RAID" offering to take the hassle out of mirroring one's data. Dropbox already has the API, so they could turn this to their advantage.
I take a picture with my phone? It's on dropbox. My wife takes a picture? It's on dropbox. I take a screenshot on my PC? It's on dropbox.
I even wrote a little silly bookmark tool to use the dropbox API.
Dropbox is amazing. It's more than just about the price.
You just answered your own question. Dropbox is convenient because you've already installed it everywhere. Google Drive is already on your Android phone and in your e-mail inbox.
I'd just stop you there because you may have answered your own question.
If I was new to the market, though, none of that reasoning really applies.
There is a legitimate reason to be wary of relying on anything Google.
Just to be absolutely clear... you'll have 2 years to drag and drop a folder to another location.
Are you saying they may significantly cut down the cloud capabilities?
Dropbox, on the contrary, only has a SINGLE service to rely on, and they could be made obsolete by pricing, features, integration or other stuff like that. It's not good to rely on a single service for your bottom line, and Dropbox is no longer a small startup just beginning on the market.
Google Drive is such a major part of Google strategy, that it seems remarkably unlikely to suffer the same fate.
And if it does? Google's deprecation and data export policies have on the whole been handled fairly well.
I just see a bunch of people still sulking about Reader and bringing it up at every opportunity. I too was sad to see it go. But Wave? It never got traction and even that was open-sourced instead of just being shuttered. The other examples you give aren't terribly persuasive examples either.
I can think of many smaller companies who've dealt with this much more poorly. I'm fairly complacent about Google on this issue.
it doesn't have threaded commenting which is sad, but the mobile apps are much better.
On the other hand your worry, while justified, does not apply to Google Drive. Google Drive is now an integral part of:
- GMail
- Google Apps
- Android
- Chromebook
- Google+
With Google Cloud the only thing I don't trust long term is their pricing - they have a history of releasing cheap or free stuff, earn popularity, earn users, after which they realize that their costs are greater than their earnings and raise those prices. Examples: Google App Engine and Google Apps.
In regards to DropBox, I support them but they really do need to reduce the pricing for those paid accounts. Pretty soon I'll need more than 100 GB and paying $19.99 per month for 200 GB is a little too expensive already, given that after a while I'll need more than 200 GB and then for 500 GB I'll need to pay $50 / month and that's way too much, when Google's 1 TB offer is for $10 / month and would last me for 2-3 years at least.
Apparently around half of the 20,000 Google employees use a version of Ubuntu ('Goobuntu'), so I wouldn't say they don't care about Ubuntu...
Meanwhile, Picasa integration was strong enough that it took years for me to figure out how to get rid of the screenshots I used on my blog 6 years ago out of the Photos app on my phone. But I wouldn't bet on Picasa being around for the long term.
Basically, I can easily see Google pivoting away from Drive being a sync client and towards some kind of always-online thing with a light local cache.
This is exactly the case for staying with Dropbox. Otherwise, your cloud provider has more leverage to lock you into their products. Dropbox is motivated to support multiple platforms.
1) Google Drive is a fundamental part of their online office suite, which means it's used internally for day-to-day employee work. Reader, Wave, Finance didn't get that status. Not to mention that having paid enterprise plans means it's a bit more mature than other things.
2) In 5 years, Dropbox could very well be referred to as "the discontinued Yahoo! Dropbox" or something similar. Not easy to predict that either.
Risk A) Google might end support for Drive. They've shown that , if they do, they'll give a lot of notice. You'll have an opportunity to move your files elsewhere.
Risk B) Dropbox goes out of business. Most likely because Google is undercutting their prices by about 90%. If you are lucky, they give some notice. They also might just send everyone home and shut off the lights, like many companies do when they file for bankruptcy.
Where's the risk really?
2. These files are all on our computers. I suspect that if dropbox blows up and does just go home and shut off the lights, we'll hear about it and notice. We can then take those files and move them to google drive or whatever.
And how do you know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years? They can't:
a) Go out of business, or b) Be acquired and have the service shutdown, or c) Have some new application of the core technology become more profitable, pivot to that as their prime focus, and discontinue the existing service retaining the infrastructure for that new application.
> Google Groups used to be huge, now to get to them you must click Apps -> More -> Even more from Google -> Scroll to the bottom of the page.
Or just type "Groups" in the Google search bar, and its the first result.
> What guarantee do we have here?
The same as you have with Dropbox.
> I'm sorry if I come off as scaremongering.
Then stop scaremongering.
And besides, if you're relying on a single system for all your backups, you're doing it wrong.
Dropbox doesn't have a 1TB plan, but 2x500GB costs $1000/year. On Drive, it costs $100/year. That's a difference of $900/year.
I don't know where you live, but around here $900/year buys you a pretty fucking good connection, with blackjack and hookers included.
it can also take a very long time.
So what? You can still use Drive until everything is copied.
And yes it can take a long time, but you might swap cloud providers every 2-5 years, you're not doing it every day. Even if it still takes a month to copy all your files, that's generally an unattended process, so it's not such a big deal.
I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's not a huge deal. All things considered, it's pretty easy to switch.
Not if you have Google Fiber!
Of course, you have to hope they don't exit that business, as well.
If google shutters it, it's not like copying a bunch of files from one place to another and waiting for it to auto-sync is a difficult endeavor.
(right now my money is on Yahoo! acquiring db to better compete with Google...but the price might be too high).
If something happens they decide to close it in the future I'll get my data pulled down and get into another service...but until then I'll be happy to keep my 150 bucks a year!
Besides, who knows where Dropbox or anyone else will be in 5 years. In 5 years they'll need to be turning a profit which could have a major impact on product and pricing, especially for the "backup" use case.
Incidentally if backup is what you want, check out an optimized service like Backblaze.. $5/month unlimited storage.
Here, you're paying. It's a business. You've got the same guarantee as you've got with Dropbox.
You refer to Dropbox and Google Drive as backup solutions. When I evaluated Dropbox, I read that they offer an addon named Packrat that turns their popular file synchronization service into an actual backup solution. Does Google now offer a similar addon for Google Drive? If not, Google Drive isn't a backup solution. And without Packrat, neither is Dropbox.
The barriers to switching away from Dropbox are based more on the number of products with Dropbox API integrations, and not on the switching costs for file sync.
Interestingly, after I read this sentence, I thought "Yeah, I'm not so sure DropBox will be around as long as Google, so I'll stick with Google".
And then I realized you wanted to make the opposite argument.
That's pretty wild. I didn't renew my Dropbox Pro account since it was by far my most expensive backup option.
I've got my Drobo that's been my Time Machine thingy for the past 5 years. I've got iCloud for recent-ish stuff. I've got Backblaze for long-term storage at $5/month (or whatever).
I had to pick and chose what to put on Dropbox and it was the most expensive option.
With Google Drive I can go back to that pricing, but no longer have to pick and choose and still get the (infrequently used, but convenient) drag & drop sharing between devices.
I think I'm going to sign up.
Google is about as likely to shut off Google Drive as it is to shut off it's search engine.
It has generally taken years of neglect for services of Google to be discontinued. Google reader was hardly updated for the last 2 years it existed.
This is a service you are paying for, how many payed for services have been discontinued by google?
The simple fact that Google can get paid for a service that only helps them further their profiling and profitability in ads and Chrome OS is more reason for them to offer the service.
I don't question reliability. I question privacy, and until Dropbox makes their NSA agreement (which I remember reading they didn't)...Dropbox is my goto!
Worst case, you know Google will give you plenty of options and time to select a new provider if they did indeed shut down Google Drive.
The big losers here will be Dropbox, HubiC, Box, etc. who will feel price pressure.
Either way I like the competition and whichever one has better security would be my preference. But in terms of shutting down I think it's important to consider how they would shut down if they did, as much as 'if they would'.
It was pretty much the same story with Windows - as long as Apple was a viable competitor PC clones were pretty decent, but once Apple started going down the tubes you started getting bargain-basement Windows machines loaded up with crapware. The Apple/Google rivalry has been really good for consumers, as Apple forces Google to get better at user experience while Google forces Apple to be more open and support standards.
At what (little) it does, Dropbox does it very well, but for what little it does, I would definitely not call it cheap. Well worth it for some people, but very marginal for others like myself. I'm not aware of any new features coming out of Dropbox in well over a year, and there are many they could easily add, so as a matter of principle, I would change to a competitor provided their feature set and performance was at least as good, at the same or lower price..
There is no guarantee of course, in theory it could be replaced by a rebranded product with a completely incompatible API later on; but I doubt it would happen because it looks like Google already went through a spring cleaning of products, with the explicit aim of killing dying, orphaned products in order to strengthen the core products.
You absolutely do not know this. Dropbox could be acquired for $99999 Billion then closed in the next 6 months.
Dropbox could be acquired and shuttered (or worse, data-mined). Google - much less likely, though it does have a tendency to close projects it does't see as strategic.
I'd say the risks are equivalent. Hedge your bets, use multiple services and secure it all with something like Boxcryptor.
I'm more concerned with whether their software is any good. I tried it a while ago and it didn't even come to close to dropbox even in terms of syncing, let alone the other things that dropbox has done.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/
Google Reader was a _free_ application and like all _free_ applications, once they start losing money they are discontinued.
Feel free to quote me on this: Dropbox will not be Dropbox in five years. It will have been acquired, gone out of business, or at least slipped into irrelevance.
Dropbox does not stand a chance against competitors like Google, Microsoft or Apple.
If they dropped drive it would mean millions of chromebooks would be made almost useless.
If Drive is used by paid users, I think it won't go away anytime soon, just like Google Cloud or Gmail.
I'd toss google scholar into the ones you listed as well. A fantastic search tool, but (unless I'm missing something) it's completely buried away on their site.
We've been doing this since 2001. Email us about our HN discount.
1. Dropbox has a high potential to be acquired by a big company when the price is right.
2. Cloud storage service is something that you don't need to be attached to. Use Google till it's good. The day it isn't, simply switch to Dropbox or whatever.
You take a risk even if it does, because a company can change their business focus, or it can go out of business, or it can be acquired by another company that doesn't rely on the product, even if the acquired company did, and you have no control over any of those contingencies.
2. If Google shutters Google Drive you'll be able to get your data off of it and move it to another vendor's solution.
* no cloud service is guaranteed to exist in 5 years. * in case any of these services are shut down, it is very likely that they give you the option to download your stuff and use it in another service.
1. No way to re-sync existing folders on your computer (seriously). I was pushing hundreds of GBs of photos to my Google Drive, and after syncing everything, upgraded to a new computer (the files were stored on an external drive locally). You'd think you should be able to reconnect to your account and point it at the files that already exist locally. Nope. There's no way to do it - the client tries to be so "smart" that it will refuse to recognize existing files, and tries to re-sync both copies (both ways) as duplicates.
2. The desktop client consumes nearly 100% CPU while syncing. I realize that while scanning local folders, the client may need to run checksums on files (potentially CPU intensive), but Google Drive was consistently eating up extraordinary CPU resources even after scanning the local files. I would expect some occasional disk IO and high network IO, but not constantly high CPU usage... who knows what they're doing.
What bothers me most is that Google appears to be completely ignoring these issues, even with hundreds of posts on their forums over years with people complaining about these things.
In my case it's things like if you need to replace a file it's luck as to if it syncs or not. First you copy it in place, but it renames the copy you just put there (no option to just replace it) so you learn to delete the thing first, but no, you'll replace it and the sync engine didn't seem smart enough to realise the file had actually changed, and you would end up with either the old file left on the server or worse it would pick up the delete operation and forget the replacement.
This was a few months ago, but that's still long after the service had been out in the wild. The concept of these cloud storage things, especially once proper APIs are available and we can switch storage providers independently of app providers, is a good one, but GDrive doesn't seem to get the fundamentals right.
Dropbox is the best overall; has the best web interface and desktop client. Google Drive is second, but because more of my clients are familiar with, and already have, Google accounts, and I pay for Google Apps already, I use Google Drive.
Google Drive has no intelligent throttling, so it consumes your entire upload pipe, which makes other apps unusable. This is not really what I want a background service to do.
90% of what I use Dropbox for is stuffing files in my Public folder and getting a URL from them, and that's a synchronous action--I can't do anything until I have the URL. So it should use all the bandwidth it can.
For me, it would be a matter of selective folder synching. Right now, you have to sync the entire drive. My Air only has 128GB SSD. I just want to sync a couple work folders, not my entire 70GB of stored files.
Unfortunately, Google's direction is pretty clear and I expect they'll discontinue support for the Desktop client before they ever enhance it.
3. No block level sync. This is a big deal for me since I use big encrypted files (block cipher). They work flawlessly with Dropbox. Incremental changes = incremental update.
Unfortunately, Google terms and conditions says, http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). "
i.e. if we store data there, we are using their service and we are giving Google "rights of ownership" permanently even after we stop using their service in future. It is definitely not good.
How can anyone give license of their personal stuff to third party?
It will be better if there is a standalone storage service which just stores,backups securely and forgets us when we opt out of their service. As far as I understand, Google drive won't fit in there. Their appetite for our personal information for advertising is not comforting.
If I misunderstood their terms, I am willing to change.
How could they possibly operate a service that has as one of its primary features sharing and copying of your content, if you didn't give them a license to do that? This is standard boilerplate for just about any service that accepts user generated content for just about any reason.
1. "reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."
2. Why they should have data even after we stop using their Services?
Users may want just storage but no integration/lock-in with their services. Google can offer "opt-in/opt-out" mechanism from their services. Is n't it?
However, I fully agree with you about the suspicious point 2.
1. Reproduce = spread your data on multiple regions/drives/computers/etc inside their data storage systems Modify = format changes Create derivative works = automatic translation, format changes etc publish = show your files to people publicly perform = show your files to people (for video) publicly display = show your files to people (images) distribute = show your files to people
2. Because their datacenter cannot delete files instantly, another CYA point that prevents people from unsubscribing and suing if their files don't disappear the same instant they click the button.
All of that is just shitty legalese that attempts to prevent frivolous lawsuits, and every time some engineer takes it literally and assumes the worst.
Google Drive: $10/1000GB = $0.01/GB
Amazon S3: $0.85/GB for the first 1 TB
Amazon Glacier: $0.01/GB
(all prices per month)
Sure, there are caveats. Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3. The terms of service probably disallow the same use cases as S3. The pricing of Google Drive almost certainly depends on users not using all their storage. Google may rate-limit heavy users or do something else to discourage people from fully utilizing the product. etc. But the point still stands: 3rd party products built on top of Amazon's infrastructure will not be able to beat this price without significant competition from Amazon.
Which shouldn't be too surprising, since the (more expensive than Drive) Google product that is more of a direct competitor to S3 (Google Cloud Storage) is still an order of magnitude less expensive than S3 (Cloud Storage is $0.085/GB for the first 1TB.)
EDIT: Well, actually, that's not true; parent's cited prices for S3 were wrong. GCS and S3 are, at least for the first TB, exactly the same price at $0.085/GB.
> This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period.
That depends. With drive you pay for allocated capacity, with S3 don't you pay for actual usage? Depending on the level of overcommit, its possible for less expensive per GB "capacity" priced service to be profitable on top of a more expensive per GB "usage" priced service.
Plus, its at least theoretically possible, especially if a lot of the stored content is not efficiently compressed on its own, that the consumer capacity-priced service could also use compression and/or deduplication to further reduce usage on the usage-priced backend.
> Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3.
Google Drive most assuredly is programmatically accessible via an API.
> That depends. With drive you pay for allocated capacity, with S3 don't you pay for actual usage? Depending on the level of overcommit, its possible for less expensive per GB "capacity" priced service to be profitable on top of a more expensive per GB "usage" priced service.
Normally I would agree, but the price gap is so large (close to 10x), you could easily downgrade to the next smallest capacity level in Google Drive. You would only actually lose money if you wanted to store more than 100 GB but less than 10/0.085 = 118 GB. That means for most overcommit levels, you're still winning by a reasonable margin.
> Plus, its at least theoretically possible, especially if a lot of the stored content is not efficiently compressed on its own, that the consumer capacity-priced service could also use compression and/or deduplication to further reduce usage on the usage-priced backend.
Compression is unlikely to yield enough, but perhaps deduplication would save you. Still, 10x is big gap to make up for.
> > Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3.
> Google Drive most assuredly is programmatically accessible via an API.
Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with the Google Drive API, but my impression is that it is geared toward entirely different use cases (compared to S3-like storage services). Could you build a business on top of it?
While Google Drive might be an interesting place to just store "some stuff", it's not really comparable for any larger scaled application.
I'm not sure what bandwidth Google Drive provides, but looking at Dropbox, I'd never want to serve any customer with that "crappy" < 1 MiB/s speed. It's okay for all the small changes Dropbox is designed for, but for serving as public storage space, it's not really acceptable.
You forget that the first 15 GB of Drive is free.
You don't get the first 15 GB of S3 (for each of your users) for free.
That's still 8.5x Google Drive. Being competitive with glacier jives with what I've heard the underlying cost of storage hardware is (still with room for profit). However, from what I hear running the request serving on top of that is fairly expensive (which is why glacier has big restrictions).
AWS says they're a cost plus org which means they drop prices as their costs drop. But that plus can be quite large.
Being #1, first to market, etc. has a big advantage. Despite knowing (or believing) these things, my org still happily spends plenty at AWS.
https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/
When you talk about Glacier, you must remember there's no instant access to files and there's bandwidth costs associated with downloading your files. The price for storage may be the same but the overall costs of Glacier are much higher.
-- Once you start using Dropbox there are some serious network effects. It takes a lot of work to get all your friends (both work and personal) to move.
-- Even though Google Drive is so much cheaper it just doesn't seem to have the usability of Dropbox. I find the web interface really hard to use for some reason. Finding documents, figuring out who share what with who.
I don't know. At this point Google might need to pay me to switch.
Seriously, Gdrive does not measure up to Dropbox. The Dropbox client is so, SO much lighter on system resources than the Gdrive client, it's stupid. I've had Gdrive end up sitting on 300+Mb of data while Dropbox happily ran with 50Mb.
As well, Google Drive has exactly one mode: on. There is next to no configuration, which led to some humorous situations.
At one point, I took down all the bandwidth at a Hackathon because Gdrive wanted to sync a bunch of files, and there's no way to limit network activity.
I do not like Gdrive, and honestly I don't feel like I need it. Their main selling point is cheapness, but my working data-footprint is only about 40GB, which fits nicely within my Dropbox account (and on my very small SSD's). I don't need, nor could I use 1TB of online space.
Now I'm a (traditional?) dropbox user, using dropbox as a synchronized folder between various computers combined with a remote backup. All I would need to do to transfer is send a few links to people to my new shared stuff (folder / album )
My only technical issue with transfer is actually transferring the file from Dropbox to Google ( 1 MBps upload ) and getting all the machine synchronized.
What keeps me on Dropbox is a few years of flawless reliability. I still remember the dark times of syncing before dropbox, YMMV, but I intent for losing files, silent conflict, ... to stay a thing of the past.
However, first it was https://hubic.com/en/offers/, now Google. Even box.com is significantly cheaper. In a few months, that will be difficult to ignore, I hope dropbox is listening.
On the converse, whenever we collaborated on an actual text document or presentation, we'd turn to Google Docs to do it, then when finished convert it into Word/PPT and stick it in Dropbox.
Time value of money.
That's just being a troll about things.
As for me, I'm considering switching now, but as you said, it's not a strong feeling, Dropbox is a big part of my life now.
First, although $120/year may be quite cheap in the world of cloud storage, hardware's cheap. You can buy a 2-TB external hard drive for less than $120. 1-TB drives are going for $60-$70 now.
So why pay rent when you can own? Buy a couple of 1-TB drives every year, copy your stuff onto both, and store one at a relative's house in another city.
Open a port on your home workstation and voila! you have "cloud" access to your data, and you can rsync it to external drives.
Yes, it's not quite as convenient and share-able as Google Drive or Dropbox, and of course the drive stored at your relative's house is not accessible, but at least it's a back-up.
My other concern can be summed up by 3 letters: NSA. There's been no resolution to the problem of unfettered access to people's private data. What's to stop the spooks from demanding my data from Google, all 1000 gigabytes of it, and Google is not even allowed to tell me it happened. No, thanks.
Also, if you are that concerned about the NSA, you would be encrypting your data before you send it up anywhere anyways.
A storage company which essentially takes a drive that you clone from your home machine (snapshot). Then they mount that drive in a data center. You then use rsync (or a client) to get them the deltas. Or, they merely store the drive and mount it when you want to do an incremental (say every week). Otherwise it goes in a vault. Cameras in vault and drives have numbers so you can literally see where your drive is sitting at any point in time. For that warm and fuzzy feeling.
The original hard drive is shipped to them (to save you the trouble of having a tb cross the network or whatever you have.). And anytime you want they ship the drive back to you. Each drive is mounted on a VPS which only you have access to. Drive spins all the time but isn't being used all the time. Hence in theory more reliability. You also keep a local backup disk as well (this is in case your house is broken into or fire etc.).
The service would only do one thing, mount the drive and provide access to the drive.
Not a big market for this for sure. But a market no less of some size. Even for company disaster recover purposes.
A couple of bitsynced folders, synced to a home storage (and other computers, shared with friends, etc...), that I can backup with Tarsnap.
Simple, reliable and MINE! :P
That being said, I find the web interface for Drive to be awful.
What I want is for the web-interface to be more "desktop-like". For example,
* It's difficult to select multiple disparate files
* you have limited options on how to sort your files
* If you search for a file, it's difficult to open up the enclosing directory (at least I can't figure it out)
* previewing large files is slow/clunky/error prone
* the whole web-interface has an inelegant feel that I don't get with gmail and other Google products.
There's room for improvement there. JMHO
If anything, it's their desktop interface that is not as good as Dropbox.
Drive still doesn't have a Linux Client.
But one bad thing is that I'm not putting all my videos up there because of the lack of space, I'm really considering switching to Google Drive now, but according to my small experience with it the client is not really good.
Google Drive could maybe be useful if there existed some working FUSE implementation that would fit on cheap single board computers like the BeagleBoards and Raspberry Pi.
EDIT: So apparently I can let individual users buy individual Google Drive storage at the prices listed in this post (and listed here: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en).
But as a Google Apps admin, if I want to buy licenses and manage them for our users, I have to pay these prices: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1726914
$9.99/mo for 1 TB if the user buys it for themselves.
$89.00/mo for 1 TB if the Google Apps admin buys it for them.
Google, this is stupid.
However, I did the same thing as you when I read this post: I went to our GA for Business account to see the pricing.
Hopefully Google will rectify or clarify the situation.
The better they get at identifying your needs, the better they can target ads to you within their ecosystem.
Google Apps + Google Drive makes sense for Google. All the products they're creating are designed to kill the desktop as we know it. Google Apps, Android (reliance on Google Now), Chromebooks, Chromecasts, ...
If I was not a developer and didn't have a garage full of old computers, a Chromebook would be the ideal PC for me.
My children will one day probably access all their data from the 'cloud'. I know that at some new schools they're even supplying Chromebooks with textbooks and assignments pre-loaded. I personally still like learning using 'dead-tree' books, but It's a different world for this generation.
[1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/04/24/google-storage-price...
I know it's nothing in the long run, but part of me really wishes I had a reason to need 10 TB so I could try to ask for 10 separate 1 TB plans with the space added together, just to force them to face this silliness head on.
$13.50 per month for 10TB!
From their T&Cs:
The bandwidth is limited to 10 Mbit/s upstream and downstream. The connection speed also depends on the quality of the Customer's internet connection.
I'd rather stick with Dropbox or AeroFS, at least security/privacy is a priority there.
They should just give up the pretense they're providing a service and make it free.
We're the product.
I dont see google drive as being less secure, you can still use truecrypt or boxcryptor or encfs.
1: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/110650-dropbox-error-login-w...
Calculating it through, I think they make about $5 profit per terabyte per year, and that's using normal prices that I'd pay for hardware and power as a consumer in America.* That is considering costs for: buying drives (with a mean time to failure of 2 years), buying a server, power for the server and drives, and storing the data with 3x redundancy (two drives can fail and a third and fourth still have it).
* "In America" must be noted because power is dirt cheap there. Like .09 dollar per kWh while here we pay .2 euros.
I'm thinking of starting an online backup service myself for a fair price and no corporate bullshit, but as a student with no money nor experience I'm very hesitant. But I might try!
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
There's really a need for a good open-source equivalent to Colossus, which would allow startups like the hypothetical one you describe to do storage must more cheaply and reliably. HDFS (with HDSF-RAID) is probably the closest.. but it's still a long way off.
I'd be interested in what other assumptions you're using to come up with the $5/T profit margin. Are you considering the cost of ingress and egress bandwidth, cooling, personnel to enact repairs? With a large enough fleet you'll have many drives/machines die every day. What about a team of engineers in an on-call rotation to keep to respond when (inevitable) failures occur? Just pointing out that drives + power is only part of the total cost of running such a service.
I wish the iOS Drive team spent half as much effort on these details as they did shoehorning their own UI conventions into iOS.
Most of my devices don't have 1TB disk space so syncing everything is out of the question.
Then you can access your files not just through some sort of third party client or web interface but over SFTP or SMB on a VPN you could configure. Or some web interface, I'm sure there are plenty in every language I can think of. Like a custom rom for your Android phone? Show your appreciation and make the developer an account on your system and let him mirror his most recent few builds.
Make websites, start a little business, learn how to implement SPDY, SSL, HSTS, PFS, learn how to migrate a bunch of sites from Apache to NGINX, grab pyloris.py and learn python, figure out how to use iptables, learn for yourself if vi is better than emacs, learn how to generate a web certificate, configure different databases, learn the hard way why you shouldn't run the likes of phpmyadmin and so on.
That's all quite valuable to offset the cost ineffectiveness of going this route for quasi-cloud storage. On the other hand, 1TB for $9.99 ain't bad... so get both and maybe find or write some python script that syncs up your Google Drive to your VPS, bam!
"Well, you could sell to us, or we could put you out of business."
I know there have been stranger acquisitions by Google, but I just can't think of any benefit to Google if they were to purchase Dropbox.
We wouldn't trust a cheap VPS provider with our data if they were offering storage at this price. What magical thing Google has that suddenly makes us all safe at this price point?
If you're referring to the service staying around, probably nothing convincing. If you're referring to your data being safe, probably the best, most battle-tested warehouse-scale data centers this side of the NSA. They restored Gmail data when they lost that [1] and nobody was paying anything then. It'd probably take co-ordinated airstrikes in multiple countries, ie world war to cause them permanent data loss.
[1] http://mashable.com/2011/03/01/google-sorry-gmail-reset/
Not really. I don't understand at all what makes it so expensive. As a student with no experience nor money I'm very hesitant, but I've actually gone over the costs of building my own online backup company. Even with harddives that never go offline (thus always consume power) and using consumer-priced hardware (no hardware at manufacturing costs), I think I can do it cheaper than Google does right now. The only requirement is having customers pay for at least ~15TB of storage space before it becomes profitable to host. At this "profitable" point I'm still not even making enough to feed myself, but it's a start.
Plus, Google can oversell their drives (and probably by a lot because there are only a few subscription types available), something which is not possible with pay-as-you-consume services like Amazon S3.
We use Google Apps but not all of our customers / partners / contractors do, and some large collections of shared files need to be downloaded and not simply viewed on a public webpage.
https://www.box.com/business/secure-file-sharing/
If anyone has alternatives for this use-case I'd love to hear about them as well, as Box.net only offers their API (so we can auto-upload files) for enterprise accounts and that's a big problem for us.
If you let other people export your files, how do you know what they're going to look like? Do you do test downloads first?
(Forgive the ignorance. I gave up on Gdrive very quickly when I saw what it did to Microsoft Ofice documents....)
Google made a social contract with the world. It was a bad marketing move to break the contract. Again and again.
You'd have to be a fool to trust your data with them today. Because they sell your information let alone that they drop services like this when they get bored.
Not sure if anyone thought of this, but some of their products could have turned into a spin off company rather than being shuttered. For example, offer people internally to take over Reader, spin it off and let it find a business model. At least it would have felt like they tried to honor their social contract.
As for Dropbox or Box being around in 5 years, the biggest risk is a company like Google buying them and then shutting them down.
Reader was implemented on top of Google's huge internal infrastructure. "Spinning it off" would be equivalent to re-writing it from scratch.
> At least it would have felt like they tried to honor their social contract.
I can't fathom the sense of entitlement in this sentence. Maybe I'm biased because I'm a Googler, but my understanding is that Google gave you a high quality news reader for free for many years.
Google spent their own money to provide that to you. And when they eventually decide to stop burning their own money, somehow they've failed to live up to their end of some "contract"? What were the terms of this contract? What did the users offer in return?
However shutting down Google Drive would be equal to shutting down google docs in my books. It would be wrong to compare Drive to wave, jaiku etc. None of those shut down services were of 'vital' and 'strategic' importance as much as Google Drive is, to the Google Inc.
Moreover, Google is pretty efficient at building data centers, with hardware prices going down coupled with their capability to run massive data centers efficiently in terms of costs, I guess Google is and will remain a major and competitive player in Cloud Storage.
They might as well discontinue Gmail and Google Apps.
I wonder if Dropbox have plans to start utilizing their own data center to get costs down...
But in general yeah I agree, the margins of all these storage companies are very high. As I've said in other comments here, I think I can do it cheaper using consumer-priced hardware (let alone on a huge scale with hardware bought at near manufacturing costs).
Creative people do not thrive in commodity businesses and their skills are in much higher demand driving massive growth as they have to this point.
Amazon will incorporate cloud storage into prime at some point and may dominate this market as they are very good at running long-term focused, commodity-based businesses.
But by the time my free storage runs out and I need to find somewhere to keep my files, I think it will be interesting to see how the prices are. I have a feeling that by then Google will be offering 100 GB for free, trying to get you to keep everything on Google Drive.
Currently sitting on 100GB of storage for free until 2020.
Google must to invest more in improving the Web and native Google Drive clients if they want to beat Dropbox. Pricing is just a cheap & temporary trick.
What I don't like is, even after I pay for this, I will still see ads and my data will still be farmed.
I want to use Dropbox but it is too expensive.
But i am not sure even at half the storage space of Google is economically sustainable.
This IS an Amazon Glacier killer if nothing else :)
Really hoping within the next 5 years someone finally comes up with the large capacity optical discs they keep promising. Bluray discs will fit in bank safety deposit but it's still a lot of hassle.
rsync.net, by default, has daily[1] ZFS snapshots enabled on your account. It's basically time machine, but more space efficient since the snapshot "diff'ing" is block based rather than file based.
So a very simple solution would be to arq your data to an HN-reader-discounted rsync.net account, and let our back end do the time-machining.
As a bonus, you can do neat things like this:
ssh 1234@usw-s001.rsync.net md5 some/file
mysqldump -u mysql db | ssh 1234@usw-s001.rsync.net "dd of=db_dump"
ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe
Was this to keep pricing cleaner?
Local sync over local network with DropBox comes in really handily sometimes.
I think you can buy a couple of 3 TB hard drives for that.
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
I recently bought 2x2tb drives for $75 each and a 2 bay Synology NAS for $150. Now I have redundancy (mirroring), online access, much faster access to my data, faster backups, And it was dead simple to setup and configure (web based configuration tool, and tool-less hardware).
Best of all the data is not subject to surveillance and pilfering.
It will take around 15 months before I will break even for my investment (vs Google drive prices), but I believe that it was worth the small amount of extra time spent and the up front spending.
Thoughts anyone?
I can't put my finger on why. But that is how I feel.