16 ms·

Save more with Google Drive

• kreek 13y ago
  If I'm going to switch from DropBox it'll be to Space Monkey, and the only reason I've yet to is that I work on music with a friend in the UK and it's not available there yet.
• gfodor 13y ago
  FYI, it looks like Google will not auto-upgrade your 100GB plan to be $1.99/mo. You need to go into the plan settings and do it yourself.
  • isnotchicago 13y ago
    Indeed. The announcement states, "If you already pay for storage, you’ll automatically move to a better plan at no additional cost," but that does not seem to cover people whose plans are simply becoming cheaper.
    • robryan 13y ago
      We pay for 100gb, I got notification that we were automatically moving to the cheaper rate.
• jaxomlotus 13y ago
  Most files that are stored and take up space are photos and videos. This could really hurt dropbox.
• d0ugie 13y ago
  Here's one more alternative to consider (not necessarily cost effective, but all the features in the world), get yourself an unmanaged VPS from a reputable ISP (me, I like http://cloud9.net http://cloud9.net), or a dedicated machine if you've got the dough, pay up for however much space and redundancy and horsepower and bandwidth you want. 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!
• magic5227 13y ago
  I'm surprised they removed 2tb and everything between 1 and 10tb? Was this to keep pricing cleaner?
• _zen 13y ago
  I can't believe there are people here who think Google Drive could be discontinued. It's an absolutely ridiculous notion. It's like thinking pigs could fly. They might as well discontinue Gmail and Google Apps.
• cherioo 13y ago
  China actually has free 10TB offer. http://www.weiyun.com/act/10t-en.html http://www.weiyun.com/act/10t-en.html Not that I would recommend it as replacement for Dropbox or Drive though.
• vdm 13y ago
  Still no delta sync. Only Dropbox just works with <1Mbps upload.
  • gburt 13y ago
    No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
    • batiudrami 13y ago
      The difference of course being that Dropbox has a significantly better user experience than GDrive, while the Nomad was a significantly worse one than the iPod.
  • prezjordan 13y ago
    Is this true? Seems like a huge oversight - why would you implement syncing without deltas?
    • andrewmunsell 13y ago
      Yeah, unfortunately they do not offer uploading just the changes.
    • TrainedMonkey 13y ago
      It is geared towards documents, rather than large files.
      • XorNot 13y ago
        Documents benefit enormously from delta-sync.
• thomasahle 13y ago
  Dropbox is $9.99 for 100GB for comparison. Drive still doesn't have a Linux Client.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    • fxthea 13y ago
      $9.99/month for Dropbox 100gb plan.
    • fiatpandas 13y ago
      $99.00 annually, $8.25 average per month for 120GB
  • icebraining 13y ago
    Well, no official Linux client. There's SyncDrive, which is based on Grive.
  • baby 13y ago
    How does the two clients compare? I'm a long Dropbox 100Gb user and I've never been disappointed. Every updates is amazing. 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.
  • illuminated 13y ago
    I use InSync (https://www.insynchq.com/ https://www.insynchq.com/) as a linux GDrive client and although I'm very happy with it I do expect Google to release a native Linux client if I ever pay for their storage.
  • koxon 13y ago
    +1, I don't get it. I had to fallback to Dropbox/Ubuntu One for cloud storage. Too bad for them, they lost a customer.
  • 13y ago
• batuhanicoz 13y ago
  Can we do "selective sync" with Google Drive? I only want to sync "Projects" folder inside my Google Driver folder, for example. Most of my devices don't have 1TB disk space so syncing everything is out of the question.
  • dewitt 13y ago
    Yes, you can do that. Open the preferences and select "Only sync some folders to this computer."
• supercanuck 13y ago
  what features am I losing by switching from Dropbox?
  • mikevm 13y ago
    your privacy.
    • scholia 13y ago
      your privacy, upload speed and reliability.... YMMV.
    • drdaeman 13y ago
      If he meant he's switching from other Google plan then there're probably no changes except for quota. If he meant he's switching from Dropbox it's not like Google's any worse or better in this regard. Both store files unencrypted (or encrypted with a key known to storage provider, although I somehow doubt it), both are probably not immune against a TLA-grade adversary. If he meant he's switching from, say, Tarsnap or Cyphertite then you're right.
      • mwfunk 13y ago
        He specifically said he said he would be switching from Dropbox, and the privacy question isn't whether or not someone could hack Drive, but rather can he trust Google to not examine his files to better characterize him for targeted ads. Regardless of whether Drive or Dropbox is more secure from hackers or the NSA or whomever, Drive's business reason for existing is specifically so they can look at your files, whereas Dropbox's business reason for existing is so that you can give them money to store your stuff. Google can make these kinds of price cuts because the money people pay them for it is only a portion of the income they receive as a result of Drive. I say that as someone who uses Drive instead of Dropbox because the balance of their respective pros and cons, for me personally, leans towards Drive. I've got no emotional attachment or aversion to either one.
    • _zen 13y ago
      https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en So much for that.
• stephengillie 13y ago
  This is the same price as Amazon Glaicer at $0.01 per GB.
  • yasth 13y ago
    Only at max use, I'd imagine average actual applied rates are still a good 5-6 times higher.
  • toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Glacier has 4-8 hour retrieval times, as well as retrieval costs, depending on how much data you're taking out over a sliding window of time.
  • scald 13y ago
    Theres a glacier price calculator out there somewhere. I recently priced 12TB and it was something like 25k to pull it all out immediately.
• simonsarris 13y ago
  I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. 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.
  • abalone 13y ago
    It is a bit scaremongery because if you're using it for backup you can just switch to another service if they announce its pending retirement. It's an inconvenience for sure, but not truly a significant reason to not go with Google. 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.
    • mb_72 13y ago
      Not to mention 'Drive' / file storage is a much more fundamental and 'core' service than those Google has shut down.
• chris_mahan 13y ago
  per month? That's $120/year, or $360 for 3 years. I think you can buy a couple of 3 TB hard drives for that.
  • pipeep 13y ago
    They're providing power, redundancy, and network connectivity.
    • staunch 13y ago
      And backups/replication/off-site storage, security, maintenance, etc.
      • chris_mahan 13y ago
        So why don't they say that? Instead it's: 9.99 per month for 1TB.
        • svenkatesh 13y ago
          Because if they did, we'd be bitching about how Google has too much marketing-speak on their copy about Drive, and how it's not that innovative since other remote storage companies do the same.
        • smtddr 13y ago
          It's implied. We all know(or should know) that GDrive is provided to us with a huge & complex infrastructure. Your TB drives at home do not begin to compare.
          • chris_mahan 13y ago
            Does it? Does the average user know this?
            • baby 13y ago
• bifrost 13y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if this was some attempt to get more of your data for ad analysis. I'd rather stick with Dropbox or AeroFS, at least security/privacy is a priority there.
  • syntheticlife 13y ago
    DINGDINGDING We have a winner. This is most likely why they don't support WebDav (where you could easily employ encryption layers over a standard protocol) They should just give up the pretense they're providing a service and make it free. We're the product.
  • adam74 13y ago
    If you are worried about privacy, you should probably encrypt your files with something like TrueCrypt.
  • msh 13y ago
    It was dropbox who let their password protection be disabled so anyone could log in to anyones account(1). 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-without-password http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/110650-dropbox-error-login-w...
    • bifrost 13y ago
      Yes, huge failure there on their part but they're still more privacy focused than Google will ever be. Google has a lot of badness to undo before they should be considered safe.
• ksaville00 13y ago
  I recently started using Google+ Photos to upload my pictures to the cloud, it's awesome. I would definitely recommend, especially now with the new lower price.
• spinchange 13y ago
  Single biggest shortcoming about Google Drive in an enterprise environment: There's no option to download an entire folder from a shared (public) link. 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.
  • scholia 13y ago
    To download a file you've created, you have to choose the public file format you want to export it to, don't you? Isn't that the only way to get them out the Gdrive lobster pot? 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....)
    • spinchange 13y ago
      There's no problem downloading a folder you've created yourself, or even if you're sharing it with someone else who has a Google Drive account. (They just have to add the folder to their own Drive account first, then they can download or sync it locally) The issue is sharing, say, a folder of PDFs or images with someone who doesn't have a Google account or one associated with their employer. They can view the entire collection and even download individual files in it piecemeal. They cannot download the entire folder as one can with Dropbox, Box, et al. I'm sure they do this to save on bandwidth and to push Drive adoption & account sign-ups, but it's very inconvenient for commercial use, especially when it's possible to do on free tiers of other competing services.
  • meritt 13y ago
    I've found box.net to be the best solution for that. We're able to give our clients access to a hierarchy of files and folders, access just requires a password (no box.net account or software) and we even get an analytics dashboard to keep tabs on what/when they're accessing things. https://www.box.com/business/secure-file-sharing/ 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.
• dweekly 13y ago
  I currently pay Google $5/year for 20GB. I use half of this. I'm supposed to be really excited about what a good deal it is that I can pay five times as much for five times as much storage that I'm not using...?
  • sparky 13y ago
    fifty times as much storage.
    • dweekly 13y ago
      Apologies for not being more specific in what I'm comparing. You're right that their TB plan is 50x my 20GB plan, but I was referring to their 100GB plan. Current plan: 20GB for $5/year ($0.41/mo) => $0.25/GB/year New Plan 1: 100GB for $23.88/year => $0.24/GB/year New Plan 2: 1TB for $119.88/year => $0.12/GB/year The 100GB plan is not a better deal for me, especially if I'm unlikely to fill the 100GB. The 1TB plan could be a better deal but only for someone using more than 500GB.
  • arsey 13y ago
    twice as much pay.
    • dweekly 13y ago
      Not sure where you're getting that math. $5/year (current price) vs $1.99/mo for 100GB = $23.88/year, which is about 5x more than I pay now.
      • arsey 13y ago
        AH, apologies. Thought your current was $5 per MONTH, and were comparing to the TB plan.
  • svenkatesh 13y ago
    You're right. Since you don't use that much storage, no one else could possibly find this price reduction useful.
• jtchang 13y ago
  It nags me that even at this great price I'm not jumping up and down to switch from Dropbox. Why is this? -- 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.
  • MadManE 13y ago
    What's the difference between paying you to switch, and just being vastly cheaper?
    • svenkatesh 13y ago
      There isn't. Apparently some HNers don't understand how to reason about economics.
      • arjie 13y ago
        It's conversational English. Consider applying the Principle of Charity. He meant "Google would need to pay me to use the service in order for me to switch.". This doesn't even explicitly mean that. It just means "I don't find this offering compelling.". See, we could have avoided this whole thread by applying the Peter Principle in conversation.
      • arjie 13y ago
        It's conversational English. Consider applying the Principle of Charity. He meant "Google would need to pay me to use the service in order for me to switch.". This doesn't even explicitly mean that. It just means "I don't find this offering compelling.". See, we could have avoided this whole thread by applying the Peter Principle in conversation.
    • gwern 13y ago
      Well, by definition being 'cheaper' has a hard upper bound: you can't get cheaper than free, so the total gain is limited to the price of the more expensive product. (If Dropbox costs you $100 a month and Drive drops to as cheap as possible, $0, you only gain $100.) But if they pay you, there's no such limit (perhaps they'll pay you $200, or $2 billion).
• higherpurpose 13y ago
  I don't know about Americans, but I hope Europeans are staying as far away from American clouds as possible. At least for government use, using non-open source American software should be considered a "national security risk" at this point, with no exaggeration.
  • icebraining 13y ago
    Ha, as if European hosted providers were safe from US snooping.
  • smtddr 13y ago
    What are some non-American & reliable cloud companies?
    • _delirium 13y ago
      Depending on what kind of cloud services you're looking for, Jottacloud (Norway) is vaguely like Dropbox. Exoscale (Switzerland) is roughly analogous to AWS.
      • sschueller 13y ago
        I would be careful with Exoscale. They are using two datacenters from Equinix which is a US based company spending hundreds if millions in new data centers in Switzerland. In addition Exoscale states: "The datacenter company guarantees us that no data shall be stored outside of Switzerland." Which would indicated that they do not own their own hardware. That would mean Equinix owns it. I do not trust Equinix and it is scary how many data centers they operate in Zürich alone now. I wonder where they get all that money to build them? NSA?
      • eropple 13y ago
        Exoscale is much more like Rackspace Cloud than AWS. Which is unfortunate. A real AWS alternative would be nice.
      • herokusaki 13y ago
• busyant 13y ago
  I use Google Drive and the new price seems quite nice to me. 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
  • taskstrike 13y ago
    Google Drive's web interface is already vastly superior to Dropbox. They also support direct linking from drive file to custom file types for web apps. If anything, it's their desktop interface that is not as good as Dropbox.
  • pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    JMHO? You must be an electrical engineer ;0)
• TrainedMonkey 13y ago
  15 GB free, 100GB for $2 per month. Your move dropbox.
  • mikeg8 13y ago
    god damn that would be awesome. Even $5 per month would be sweet
  • akfanta 13y ago
    or even better, $10 for 1TB per month. I would jump in a heart beat. Superior desktop client and widely adopted API is the two major reasons I am gonna stick with Dropbox.
• jscheel 13y ago
  This is quite tempting, but the Google Drive client is just too terrible. I've never once had a single problem with the Dropbox client. Ever.
  • svenkatesh 13y ago
    Except for all of the security problems DropBox has had over the years, right?
    • genwin 13y ago
      Sensitive info I have in DropBox is TrueCrypt-encrypted, so not an issue for me. I'd never trust the cloud completely.
  • janinge 13y ago
    I stopped using Dropbox when their OS X client repeatedly got stuck syncing on most of my machines, and started pegging the CPU and draining my batteries. Tried reinstalling a few times months apart and promptly hit the same problem each time. 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.
    • e12e 13y ago
      Anything wrong with: http://gdfuse.forge.ocamlcore.org/ http://gdfuse.forge.ocamlcore.org/ ?
      • janinge 13y ago
        No, it worked mostly on my desktop last time I tried it (didn't seem robust vs. 500 errors from Google, and crashed a few times). However, it's not small when you include all the Ocaml libraries it depends on, so it's not an option if you want to run it from built-in flash. And cross compiling with Ocaml isn't quite straightforward, so you'll also need to maintain a build environment on ARM, MIPS or whatever you have (e.g. using QEMU).
• iwasakabukiman 13y ago
  Right now I use SkyDrive, since I got 200 GB free for two years when I got my Surface. So I'm set for now. 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.
  • ratscabies 13y ago
    I am not sure if this is true, but from what I understand, once your time is up, the files are still there, but they are read only.
  • kchoudhu 13y ago
    Look out for the offers that periodically give you free storage for a year for using bing. Currently sitting on 100GB of storage for free until 2020.
• dperfect 13y ago
  I won't go near Google Drive until they fix some serious longstanding issues with the desktop client. The two that caused me to abandon Google Drive (I even have a free TB for 3 years from my Chromebook Pixel): 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.
  • zacwest 13y ago
    The big client issue for me is the bandwidth usage. 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.
    • derefr 13y ago
      I actually get annoyed when Dropbox doesn't consume my entire upload pipe. 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.
      • dperfect 13y ago
        I think the point is that it should be user-configurable. Most of the competitors' desktop clients (including Dropbox) have a setting for that, so you can choose what suits your needs.
• Groxx 13y ago
  So they finally got prices below where they were almost two years ago[1]. Still very yay and that's a great deal, but I'll keep my legacy $5/year plan. [1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/04/24/google-storage-prices-go-up-significantly-with-drive-launch-but-grandfathered-plans-will-be-honored-indefinitely-new-vs-old-vs-dropbox-comparison/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/04/24/google-storage-price...
  • xhrpost 13y ago
    I have the same legacy plan and had a similar sentiment. However, as pointed out below, the $10/mo for 1TB is technically cheaper per GB/mo than the $5 legacy package. Still, until I need it, I won't bother upgrading.
    • Groxx 13y ago
      Yeah, but saying X/month is cheaper GB/month so it's a better deal is like saying buying in bulk is a better deal. It's true... if you use it. Personally, I'm not tempted by 3 donuts for the price of 2 when I just want one.
• lucb1e 13y ago
  And still making an easy profit. 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!
  • daave 13y ago
    3x redundancy is very cost ineffective. See this 2010 Google presentation (slide 13) on the 'Colossus' File System, which uses Reed-Solomon encodings. http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/university/relations/facultysummit2010/storage_architecture_and_challenges.pdf 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.
• frade33 13y ago
  I love dropbox, But I must say, this pricing is way too much tempting. And as a consumer I am happy.
• lazyjones 13y ago
  Shouldn't they rather be paying their users to upload their data for data-mining, analysis and whatever else Google wants to do with it?
• blisterpeanuts 13y ago
  I see two problems with massive offsite storage such as Google Drive 1 TB. 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.
  • fletchowns 13y ago
    Buying a couple 1TB drives and storing them in different locations doesn't even come close to a proper storage solution that lives in a datacenter. Also, if you are that concerned about the NSA, you would be encrypting your data before you send it up anywhere anyways.
  • return0 13y ago
    NSA is a much much bigger problem than price.
  • larrys 13y ago
    Raises an interesting idea. (At relatives house raises security questions..) 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.
• q2 13y ago
  Implicit expectation of any storage service is, data will remain private and when we remove data from there, it won't exist anywhere on Google systems in any form. Unfortunately, Google terms and conditions says, http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ 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.
  • mcintyre1994 13y ago
    Those all seem like fairly standard requirements to operate at Google's scale and interoperate with their services - publicly perform seems kinda dangerous but I trust Google not to show secret data in a keynote. They are broad, but they also restrict to for their services, which are also broad but does presumably mean if they stop offering any relevant service they're not going to have a license to use your data for something else.
  • zmmmmm 13y ago
    > How can anyone give license of their personal stuff to third party? 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.
• glesica 13y ago
  Now if only Google Drive had a viable (first-class) sync app for Linux...
• aresant 13y ago
  My biggest hope w/this announcement is that DropBox responds with a stronger 500 GB offering which, presently, is $500+ a year.
• fh973 13y ago
  If you only care about the file storage (you don't have 1TB of Docs do you?), there is also NSA-free Hubic from OVH. https://hubic.com/ https://hubic.com/ $13.50 per month for 10TB!
  • Karunamon 13y ago
    OVH scares me. This is the company that mismanaged their pricing structure (for hosting/VPS) and as a result shut down all orders for quite a while.
  • kondro 13y ago
    Good luck with ever using that. 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. 10TB @ 10Mbps == 92.6 days to transfer (up or down)
• kbar13 13y ago
  is there a OSX backups solution akin to time machine / arq that takes advantage of google drive?
  • rsync 13y ago
    arq supports, as one of its transport mechanisms, plain old SFTP. 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 [1] You can specify any time interval, but >7 dailies counts against your quota...
• harrystone 13y ago
  I would be tempted if there was something like gsutil for Google Drive like there is for Google Cloud Storage. But putting a cheap slackware box in the rack at work and mounting a folder via sshfs is free.
• taigeair 13y ago
  No mention of Baidu Pan's free 2TB?
• cabbeer 13y ago
  Can I get 2TB for $20 or am I forced to get the next tier up? (10TB @$100)
• Paul12345534 13y ago
  Quite happy paying for Crashplan at the moment but Google Drive has the allure of instant access to files with a nice API... no heavy desktop client.... complete control how you access them.... I have 4-5TB total between my photography and other work. 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.
• calgaryeng 13y ago
  Put 1TB of data into Drive, and then lose it all when Google closes your account and has no humans to fix it....
• jggonz 13y ago
  Google Drive allows Google to create a more 'accurate' fingerprint of who you are by examining everything you create. This clearly has huge value... Possibly even more than Google+ if used correctly. 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.
  • sixothree 13y ago
    I can't see any other reason google would offer this for such a low price. It's subsidized.
• saturdaysaint 13y ago
  Outside of it's document editing, I find Drive's iOS app to be pretty half-assed. Dropbox can handle anything you throw at it much more reliably, and typically has a far better built-in viewer/player. You can't play .m4a files in Drive, for example, or search within a .pdf. Sure, these things can be offloaded to other apps, but I find this makes managing my phone's storage a lot more cumbersome. I also like how photos/videos get their own tab in Dropbox's iOS app. I wish the iOS Drive team spent half as much effort on these details as they did shoehorning their own UI conventions into iOS.
• yoavush 13y ago
  Umm.. seems like we'll have no choice but to pay that!
• jliptzin 13y ago
  If nothing else this just exposes how high Dropbox's margins must be.
  • lucb1e 13y ago
    I think Dropbox actually spends a fair bit more on bandwidth because of all the syncing. As far as I know Google has no desktop client (and if they do they failed to offer it to me), whereas with Dropbox it's really the way to go. 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).
    • alastair 13y ago
      > As far as I know Google has no desktop client https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive/?hl=en https://tools.google.com/dlpage/drive/?hl=en
      • lucb1e 13y ago
        Not for my OS. And thanks for the downvote.
  • kalleboo 13y ago
    Dropbox is based on Amazon S3 which at their cheapest advertised rate costs 4x more than than what Google is offering. (although with Dropbox's usage they can probably get a volume discount) I wonder if Dropbox have plans to start utilizing their own data center to get costs down...
    • daave 13y ago
      > I wonder if Dropbox have plans to start utilizing their own data center to get costs down... Mid last year a recruiter from Dropbox told me they were looking into this, and wanted to make it happen in 2014.
• gtirloni 13y ago
  They are offering a product at 1/10th of the price of their competitors. That comes at a cost. Customer support is already bad enough, my guess is the infrastructure isn't that great so they can price it cheaply. 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?
  • ansimionescu 13y ago
    [citation needed]
  • lucb1e 13y ago
    > They are offering a product at 1/10th of the price of their competitors. That comes at a cost. 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.
  • mcintyre1994 13y ago
    > 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/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/01/google-sorry-gmail-reset/
  • alecdbrooks 13y ago
• Legion 13y ago
  Does this not apply to Google Apps? I went to add Google Drive Storage to our GA for Business account and the page said $89 per month per license for 1 TB. 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 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 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.
  • isomorphic 13y ago
    Are we sure that this isn't just an oversight, or they haven't gotten around to updating the Apps pricing page yet? I mean, it's not like Google has consistency problems across all of their properties. 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.
• frade33 13y ago
  I was busy reading the post itself, and just got my eyes on the comments below. Damnit! Oh! Well, there is plenty of concern, regarding google shutting down its various services in the past. 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.
• lispm 13y ago
  Ah, okay. The new NSA data center went online.
• batoure 13y ago
  My feeling towards google drive has always been... meh. But this is pretty exciting, mostly because dropbox will have to react and this will mean that whatever service on dropbox I am engaged in will soon get better by some order of magnitude... hopefully.
• simon_weber 13y ago
  re: Linux users complaining of lack of clients, check out insynchq.com. I've been a happy user for the last few months.
• ksk 13y ago
  Does paying for Google Drive make your account eligible to be synced over MS Exchange via Google Apps Sync since you're now a paying customer of Google?
• eslaught 13y ago
  What I find interesting about this is that the Google Drive is now significantly less expensive than Amazon S3, and even comparable to Amazon Glacier. 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) This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period. 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.
  • eXpl0it3r 13y ago
    Amazon S3/Glacier don't just provide some random cloud storage, but availability from specific locations, guaranteed bandwidth/rate, detailed logging, API, etc. 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.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > What I find interesting about this is that the Google Drive is now significantly less expensive than Amazon S3 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.
• justinhj 13y ago
  Most people would use this for photos, in which case using Flickrs free 1tb makes this look extortionately priced.
• gcb0 13y ago
  like what was making me avoid those products was the price/storage ratio...
• kbenson 13y ago
  My thought process on pricing like this inevitably follows the same pattern. First, 1 TB for $9.99? Cool! Then, 10 TB for $99.99? Why are you trying to jack me for 9 cents? 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.
  • jtuente 13y ago
    Think of it as a fee for the fact that 10TB HDDs don't exist yet.
• adamb_ 13y ago
  Aren't these cost reductions more or less in line with Moore's law? I know the SSD/HDD market isn't exactly doubling storage capacity every 18 months, but seems to me like these price changes should be expected.
• brianmcdonough 13y ago
  Cloud storage is not going away. It's just getting massively cheaper and will continue to do so until the team at dropbox gets bored with running a commodity business and turn to conquer another big problem. 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.
• sebastianavina 13y ago
  I'm still waiting for Google Drive for Linux...
• Spoom 13y ago
  Theory: They're dumping to lower the valuation of Dropbox for a possible later acquisition. "Well, you could sell to us, or we could put you out of business."
  • aqzman 13y ago
    If Google were to buy Dropbox what sort of benefit do you think they would get from it? 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.
    • cbr 13y ago
      A linux client.
    • batiudrami 13y ago
      Stronger user lock in once they convert users to GDrive. If your plan is to lock users into Google services, then having all their files in GDrive, integrated with Gmail, GDocs, G+ etc. is going to work towards that. Plus it allows them to corner a market as I suspect Dropbox easily has a majority (I'd guess 80+%) share in consumer cloud storage. Do I think that is worth what Dropbox would cost? Probably not, but Google has heaps of money and hey, what would I know?
• sytelus 13y ago
  Absolutely not good enough. Even at $10/mo these prices are horrible. To compare this, Flickr is currently offering 1TB FREE for all photos + videos storage. Even my crummy hosting provider is offering 1TB for $5/mo with unlimited bandwidth plus host of other goodies thrown in. Dropbox paid account was already a rip off. Google Drive is less ripoff, but ripoff none the less.
  • Paul12345534 13y ago
    Flickr is also limited to jpeg photos only ;) and I'd trust Google for safety of my data (not necessarily privacy) for more than a crummy hosting provider.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• scald 13y ago
  Kryder's law will hold true, but right now that's not enough for me to leave Dropbox.
• zmmmmm 13y ago
  This is really aggressive. It's so aggressive that it feels strategic. Google is trying to shift the market here. I think they have come to the realization that at a large scale people are not buying their philosophy that you can put everything in the cloud. By and large, we're putting selected things in the cloud for the purposes of sharing, but we're not making the cloud our primary location for our storage. That's what Google wants. They don't just want the docs that you like or need to share in the cloud - they want your whole hard drive up there. So they have calculated how much a "normal" person might be willing to spend on that and worked backwards from there. I strongly suspect this is going to accompany a wave of marketing and a big push for ChromeOS.
• Rygu 13y ago
  In the Top 10 things people first do on new hardware (desktop, laptop, tablet or phone): Installing Dropbox. 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.
• callesgg 13y ago
  Using dropbox somehow feels unprofessional/unsophisticated, google drive does not. I can't put my finger on why. But that is how I feel.
• woopdy 13y ago
  Triple it.
• joedevon 13y ago
  I happily pay for both Box AND Dropbox and this does not in the least entice me. 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.
  • munificent 13y ago
    > For example, offer people internally to take over Reader, spin it off and let it find a business model. 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?
    • joedevon 13y ago
      Entitlement? Google sold geeks the world over on a different kind of company. A "Don't Be Evil" company. A company we could trust with our personal email. That supported the open source community. But it was a big bait and switch. I never got over the betrayal. That's what I mean by social contract. Google today is very different. Sure, we got gmail for "free". Google made a TON of money off that "free" offer BTW. And like many others, I built a dependency on this email system. Countless services and people know me on that email address. I'd LOVE to get rid of it because I no longer trust Google, but it's challenging as hell. That's why dependency on the wrong company is, dare I say it, evil. A quote from the "Don't be evil" entry on Wikipedia: "Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out", adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent." While there are a lot of great things about Google, there are a lot of shitty things too. Back in the day it was important to make the ads unobtrusive. To separate out ads from organic results. Now on a commercial product SERP you have to page down to get to the first organic result! I mean, the list of issues goes on and on. You ask: "What were the terms of this contract? What did the users offer in return?" Ummm...Google has a gazillion dollars. I think the users offered plenty in return for believing in Google. -- I remember the excitement of RSS. And how wonderful Reader was. The "gift" of Google's "free" Reader has turned into a massive NEGATIVE for the open source community and those who loved RSS. With "friends" like these bearing "gifts", who needs enemies? This has been discussed ad infinitum, so I'll leave it at that. But it's in this context that I think you'd be nuts to trust Google with a Dropbox clone. RE: infrastructure, fair enough. Final note, knowing quite a few Googlers and Xooglers, the engineers are better individually than what the company has turned into. Since the IPO, things have never been the same.
• hrjet 13y ago
  I welcome this direction. Google needs to make money directly from user, instead of advertisements. What I don't like is, even after I pay for this, I will still see ads and my data will still be farmed.
• elwell 13y ago
  Just realized title was a pun.
• tn13 13y ago
  I did not even know that Google drive had a storage facility like dropbox. Until today I was under impression Google Drive was another name for Google Docs. Never used it anyways.
• izietto 13y ago
  hubiC by OVH offers 10TB for 10€: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7397607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7397607
• ksec 13y ago
  I really really wish Dropbox could up their capacity as well. 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.
• mrlinx 13y ago
  Anyone have any idea if its possible to buy two 100Gb plans? my backups are around 200gb, and buying 1Tb doesn't seem reasonable.