1,000 gigs for 10 bucks a month. Wow; bring it on!
Check out the new pricing for Google Drive (which integrates with my product, Google Photos):
Storage is shared between Gmail, Drive, and Google+ Photos so you can focus on the content of your messages, files, and photos instead of how much you’re storing and where. Today, we’re making it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from everywhere.
We’ve lowered the price of our monthly storage plans to $1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99), and $99.99 for 10TB, with even more storage available if you need it. You can sign up for one of these new storage plans at www.google.com/settings/storage. And of course, 15GB remains free.
In addition you can store an unlimited number of photos at 2048 resolution. To give it a spin, download Google Drive & start dropping in your raw files (or JPEGs, etc). They’ll sync with the cloud & be ready to edit & share via Google+.
What do you think? I’m still quite new to Google, so any & all feedback is welcome!
Starting to approach prices I might pay (for me, it’d still be $30/month, I guess.)
CrashPlan would seem like good competition, but their servers are bottlenecked at around 500kbps, and their “seeding” feature is artificially limited to 1TB. I don’t expect google will have the same bottlenecked peering issues. Don’t know if Google’d consider a seeding feature but they totally should.
I’ve been using their 100GB at $4.99/m for the past year and just upgraded to the new pricing. I’ll take a $36/yr savings. My primary use is with clients as an FTP alternative. I do retouching and graphic design so large files are constantly being exchanged. For my longterm clients with google drive installed, a shared folder gives them nice drag and drop file exchange abilities. I’ve used most of the competitors dropbox and sugarsync etc. I’ve stuck with google since I use them for my email and use google docs heavily and the price was right compared to its competitors for what I needed. It has it’s issues but it works for me.
As for the mention of Crashplan, the are completely separate services and don’t offer the same thing. It’s a offsite backup solution (not including the operating system) and not a file sync/share solution. I have Crashplan and have been using it for 2 years and have found it to be well worth the ~$5/m. At this point I have about 2.3TB on their servers. The seed of 1TB is limited but then at those sizes the product might just not be make for your needs. I have had the need to restore from them, both in small amounts that i could do by downloading about 300GB of files. The last time I needed to restores 1.5TB of lost files (my fault) and the restore-to-door was worth the extra money. Had my files in 5 days, heaven know how long that would have take to download. Can’t say to see the 500kbps bottleneck too often.
Just so I understand: Any photo less than 2K across that I upload to my Drive does -not- count towards my storage limit? Even if I’m on the freebie 15G plan? Do I need to use a special folder or uploader, or just any photo under 2K is free?
[Any photo. When you use the desktop auto backup utility (which I’ll write about separately) you have a choice of whether to upload original, full-size files, or just “standard size” (2048) ones. I believe the full images get uploaded & then (depending on your preference) downsampled. —J.]
(By the way, all of your photos are already on-line, even if you haven’t posted them…)
Ah, so you have to use the Google Drive client. If I use Jeffrey Friedl’s Google Drive Lightroom plugin and set the size to 2048, that won’t work?
I have probably 9 TB of files, both edited and non-edited. I tend to only upload selected and edited JPEG files to Google. The problem really is the bandwidth and time necessary to upload the files. If I could have all my files, unedited and edited, on my Google drive that would be fine, but the process and time of uploading and the bandwidth charge would be excessive. Right now I have a legacy plan 256 GB @ $20.00/year. I am using 83 GB of storage. So the offer is great, but how do I get my files, edited, unedited, RAW, and JPEG into my Google drive? The time and bandwidth charge would be excessive.
Google Drive is great, and I recently dropped Dropbox Pro in favor of it.
Biggest issue I’m seeing with transitioning my school to Google Apps for Education is the people who already have a personal Gmail/Drive account. Any way to use both more seamlessly? Maybe pay for 100GB personal plan and share everything in one top level Drive folder from work account? Or is there a way to sync multiple Drives to OS X?
[The only way I’ve found to sync multiple Drive accounts with OS X is by creating multiple OS X users. There may be a better way, but I haven’t discovered it. —J.]
Yes, this is unfortunately the blocking issue for even trying gdrive for photos. We use gmail and gdrive (Mac sync client) at work and share folders using our work email domain, then gmail and dropbox for my wife’s creatives business, and then there is personal use. Since I use gdrive at work, and it is associated with my work’s email domain, that seems to preclude me using it for my wife’s work, or for personal use. It would be interesting to know of workarounds or if there are plans to fix this limitation.
I love google storage. Bought it years ago to use with Picasa.
But.. I think Google Picasa need to be better for handling images. Its needs a serious update… Biggest feature I miss it the ability to run it off a Mac without the images are stored local. (Just like Adobe Revel).
The whole layout needs a bit of a redesign (new paint..), some functions needs to go and other needs to be added – if you ask me.
I guess its still the best free option of a foto editor. But its getting outdated..
//PoulG
I think Picasa is dead. It’s all “Google Photos” via Google+ now.
This is very attractive pricing—comparable to the “legacy” pricing I received when Google first announced what was then known as Google Storage—and certainly a welcome reduction from the previous price schedule.
I’ve depended on Google as a provider of off-site archival service ever since that era, and in general have been pleased with both the price and the performance. However, I’d like to see Google open up the service to additional client software. Google Drive would be a more useful service—not only for storage of photographs but also for general back-up purposes—if it was accessible through a Secure Shell channel. Ideally, I’d like to be able to use an s/ftp client for both uploads and downloads.
Just tested it a bit against dropbox. I dont see much difference in convenience. But!
I can’t make selective sync of folder within folders. I can in Dropbox (but its hidden in the preferences/advanced/selective sync). In Google Drive it stored in preferences/sync only. But it’s only “top” folders.
If Google Drive had the possibility to selective sync subfolders I would not hesitate to dump dropbox and their heavy pricing. But now I need to lure out how to structure my data on topfolders only. That might not be that easy. Anyway I’ve decided to use GD free edition for the next month just to see how it actually goes .