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Save more with Google Drive

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Re: Save more with Google Drive

#361

Post by Retric »

fletchowns wrote: post #48
icebraining wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares? If they close it, you signup for a competitor and re-upload the data. Even if they do close it, you'll have months to copy everything. And besides, if you're relying on a single system for all your backups, you're doing it wrong.

That's a terrible retort. Downloading and then uploading a terabyte of data can be very expensive depending on where you live, and it can also take a very long time.

You don't need to download locally, rent a server for ~50$ and use it to do the download + upload and even if they shut down in 2.5 years your still saving over 2,000$ which IMO is worth a reasonable effort.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#362

Post by Chronic26 »

aragot wrote: post #297
barrkel wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd probably bet on Google putting Dropbox out of business with competition, then getting rid of Drive because it's no longer a growth area.

This. The very obvious thing in the $10 terabyte offer is, Google wants Dropbox and all data hosters out of business. So I trust that Dropbox _will_ be out of business very soon.

No. Google will drop Drive just like they dropped their other products. I'm sure of it.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#363

Post by robryan »

isnotchicago wrote: post #247
gfodor wrote: post #156

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.

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.

We pay for 100gb, I got notification that we were automatically moving to the cheaper rate.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#364

Post by Chronic26 »

thefreeman wrote: post #335
SeanDav wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a choice - it is better to place your bet with the company whose main business line depends on the service you are using. Google has a long history of dropping services, because it can. It does not matter to Google that 10k people or 100k people find that particular service useful. Google is not about to drop search and search related ads any time soon - storage services it could drop tomorrow and not car…

It's not like Google is just going to cancel Drive and delete all of your files. If Drive goes away all you need to do is signup for Drop Box...

And what happens when they will remove your files, say after 1 year of shutting down the service? Where will the users with TB of data flock to?

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#365

Post by ekianjo »

untog wrote: post #27
simonsarris wrote: post #9

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…

I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. 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).

On top of that, Google Drive makes sense to Google for their multi-devices/Google Access Everywhere kind of strategy. When you have tablets or phones with limited memory but network access, Google Drive plays well in that space to extend the capabilities of the said devices.

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.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#366

Post by eslaught »

dragonwriter wrote: post #316
eslaught wrote: post #238

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 Driv…

> 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 cite…

> > 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.

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?

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#367

Post by yuhong »

nostrademons wrote: post #92
e40 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the general sentiment, but in this case, I think it's pretty clear it's central to Google's strategy. Now, Nexus phones? Those might not exist in a few short years.

Nexus is necessary as long as Apple sticks around as a viable competitor (which seems like the foreseeable future). Without the Nexus line there's no counterweight to prevent the public from associating "Android" with "crapware", because every OEM has an incentive to take distribution deals from crapware providers, and nobody except Google has an incentive to preserve the reputation of Android as a slick, easy to use…

OT, but IMO on Google, while open allocation is probably worth looking at, I'd settle for firing Vic Gundotra for now. Not because of "Real Games", but the Real Names fiasco and this: http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#368

Post by batiudrami »

gburt wrote: post #7
vdm wrote: post #2

Still no delta sync. Only Dropbox just works with <1Mbps upload.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

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.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#369

Post by batiudrami »

aqzman wrote: post #281
Spoom wrote: post #269

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."

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.

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?

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#370

Post by shaneofalltrad »

SeanDav wrote: post #108
untog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. 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).

If there is a choice - it is better to place your bet with the company whose main business line depends on the service you are using. Google has a long history of dropping services, because it can. It does not matter to Google that 10k people or 100k people find that particular service useful. Google is not about to drop search and search related ads any time soon - storage services it could drop tomorrow and not car…

I would like to add, the service provider that has built software for MAC, IOS, Windows, Linux and Android might be a better choice as well. I do like both Google Drive and Dropbox, but Google can't even make the time to support Linux and obviously can, so would you trust them when they have motives other than a universal storage device. Heck, even Ubuntu One does this well.
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