
Save more with Google Drive - aritraghosh007
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/save-more-with-google-drive.html
======
simonsarris
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.

~~~
untog
_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).

~~~
yukichan
Dropbox is profitable yeah? Why wouldn't they be around in 5 years? Google's
prices are so much cheaper than Dropbox, but the ease of use with Dropbox, and
the fact that I have my families devices and computers already set up probably
means I wont ever switch.

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.

~~~
untog
_Dropbox is profitable yeah? Why wouldn 't they be around in 5 years? Google's
prices are so much cheaper than Dropbox_

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.

~~~
fleitz
I think that's actually part of the problem, I think of Google Drive as where
I put attachments from email, not files and folder on my computer.

I can't put my finger on it but Drive just seems clunky, especially with the
GMail / Docs integration.

~~~
shaneofalltrad
Try it on Ubuntu or Mint then! Talk about clunky, you have no choice but to
get the stuff from the web and download. That's why I stick with Dropbox.

------
dperfect
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
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
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
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.

------
q2
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.

~~~
zmmmmm
> 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.

~~~
q2
If this is the standard boilerplate, then standard needs to be changed :). Why
a "pure" storage service needs to do following?

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?

~~~
AceJohnny2
1\. might be for automatically creating a .pdf from a .doc file at a URL you
can then share with others. The doc->pdf conversion falls under the
"reproduce, modify, create derivative works" legalese, and the URL creation
that others can access through the autogenerated "secret" (which isn't,
legally, it's public) falls under the "communicate, publish..." legalese. I'm
taking this explanation from a similar one that Dropbox themselves (IIRC)
published about their own terms of service that had users outraged!

However, I fully agree with you about the suspicious point 2.

------
eslaught
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

~~~
eslaught
> > 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?

------
jtchang
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
What's the difference between paying you to switch, and just being vastly
cheaper?

~~~
svenkatesh
There isn't. Apparently some HNers don't understand how to reason about
economics.

~~~
arjie
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.

------
blisterpeanuts
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.

~~~
larrys
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.

~~~
brador
Couldn't the NSA just loop the security tape to keep you warm and fuzzy while
they get your drive?

~~~
larrys
Details details. Well first they would need physical access and then they
would also need to know which drive number was owned by which person (not
super difficult for sure but a system could be designed where it was more
"swiss" in style of identification) and then they would have to break the
encryption if they gained access.

I am not and wasn't specifically doing this for NSA reasons more just typical
reasons why you wanted to keep an offsite backup and not have it on the same
drive (and mounted) in a way that would make it less likely to get taken by
hackers because it wasn't physically connected to the network.

So the question is, what is more secure (and not saying there aren't
drawbacks..)

\- Files stored by google, dropbox whatever \- Files stored at your aunt's \-
Files stored in a secure data center only physically mounted at specific times
(1 time every 2 weeks say) and otherwise in a locked vault identified by
number. Needing ssh key to gain access which only you have. And only you know
the time it will be mounted for that matter. And maybe a text message back to
your cell as well (how is all of that for security by obscurity?)

For that matter safe deposit boxes aren't that expensive if you have a local
bank you could simply store a clone copy of your drive there and it would be
essentially safe from fire, theft and the NSA since they wouldn't know it was
there to even gain (legal) access to it, right?

~~~
brador
If the intent is to make an offline backup that can't be found easily you
could just dig a hole in your local park. If it's a backup of, say, customer
details, that you need access to update sometimes, then the best option would
be client side encryption with a cloud drive. The rest is a magic show of busy
work that achieves no additional goals.

------
busyant
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
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.

------
thomasahle
Dropbox is $9.99 for 100GB for comparison.

Drive still doesn't have a Linux Client.

~~~
icebraining
Well, no _official_ Linux client. There's SyncDrive, which is based on Grive.

------
jscheel
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
Except for all of the security problems DropBox has had over the years, right?

~~~
genwin
Sensitive info I have in DropBox is TrueCrypt-encrypted, so not an issue for
me. I'd never trust the cloud completely.

------
Legion
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
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.

------
higherpurpose
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.

~~~
smtddr
What are some non-American & reliable cloud companies?

~~~
_delirium
Depending on what kind of cloud services you're looking for,

Jottacloud (Norway) is vaguely like Dropbox.

Exoscale (Switzerland) is roughly analogous to AWS.

~~~
herokusaki
How is your experience with Jottacloud?

~~~
_delirium
I haven't tried it yet, mostly because of the lack of a Linux client. They
claim they will ship one in 2014, though.

They give you an interesting choice between pricing models
([http://www.jottacloud.com/prices/](http://www.jottacloud.com/prices/)).
Besides the conventional pay-for-space model, they have another model where
you get unlimited space but pay per linked device, $6/mo per computer and
$1.70/mo per mobile device.

------
stephengillie
This is the same price as Amazon Glaicer at $0.01 per GB.

~~~
toomuchtodo
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.

------
jggonz
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
I can't see any other reason google would offer this for such a low price.
It's subsidized.

------
zmmmmm
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.

------
ksaville00
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.

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

~~~
prezjordan
Is this true? Seems like a huge oversight - why would you implement syncing
without deltas?

~~~
TrainedMonkey
It is geared towards documents, rather than large files.

~~~
XorNot
Documents benefit enormously from delta-sync.

------
Groxx
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-
price...](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/)

~~~
xhrpost
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
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.

------
kbenson
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
Think of it as a fee for the fact that 10TB HDDs don't exist yet.

------
TrainedMonkey
15 GB free, 100GB for $2 per month. Your move dropbox.

~~~
akfanta
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.

------
fh973
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
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.

------
bifrost
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.

~~~
msh
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-w...](http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/110650-dropbox-error-login-
without-password)

~~~
bifrost
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.

------
lucb1e
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
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.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/university/relations/facultysummit2010/storage_architecture_and_challenges.pdf)

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.

------
batoure
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.

------
sebastianavina
I'm still waiting for Google Drive for Linux...

------
saturdaysaint
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.

------
dweekly
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...?

~~~
svenkatesh
You're right. Since you don't use that much storage, no one else could
possibly find this price reduction useful.

~~~
dweekly
My point is - they used to have excellent $/GB plans (grandfathered), then
reduced the value, and now have improved the value back to roughly what it was
before.

~~~
mikeash
The 15GB tier is free. Since you're only using 10GB, they've effectively
dropped you from $5/year to $0/year. Not sure why you're complaining.

------
batuhanicoz
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
Yes, you can do that. Open the preferences and select "Only sync some folders
to this computer."

------
d0ugie
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!

------
Spoom
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
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.

~~~
batiudrami
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
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
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.

------
gtirloni
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?

~~~
mcintyre1994
> 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/)

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

------
spinchange
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.

~~~
meritt
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.

~~~
spinchange
I've found Box to be the "go to" solution for this as well. We don't have to
share large collections often enough to justify a monthly subscription yet,
but may in the future.

I just find it to be a shame that we pay for Google Apps, get our people used
to and accustomed to using things like Drive and then have to find/pay for
another SaaS solution (that's more than we pay for the entire suite of Google
Apps) just because people outside our organization can't download a folder
from Google's file hosting service w/o signing up for it themselves.

------
joedevon
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
> 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
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.

------
frade33
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.

------
cherioo
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.

------
_zen
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.

------
jliptzin
If nothing else this just exposes how high Dropbox's margins must be.

~~~
kalleboo
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
> 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.

------
glesica
Now if only Google Drive had a viable (first-class) sync app for Linux...

------
brianmcdonough
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.

------
iwasakabukiman
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.

~~~
kchoudhu
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.

------
lispm
Ah, okay. The new NSA data center went online.

------
frade33
I love dropbox, But I must say, this pricing is way too much tempting. And as
a consumer I am happy.

------
jaxomlotus
Most files that are stored and take up space are photos and videos. This could
really hurt dropbox.

------
Rygu
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.

------
adamb_
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.

------
harrystone
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.

------
kreek
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.

------
hrjet
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.

------
tn13
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.

------
ksec
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.

------
ksk
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?

------
lazyjones
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?

------
mrlinx
Anyone have any idea if its possible to buy two 100Gb plans? my backups are
around 200gb, and buying 1Tb doesn't seem reasonable.

------
aresant
My biggest hope w/this announcement is that DropBox responds with a stronger
500 GB offering which, presently, is $500+ a year.

------
Paul12345534
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.

------
simon_weber
re: Linux users complaining of lack of clients, check out insynchq.com. I've
been a happy user for the last few months.

------
justinhj
Most people would use this for photos, in which case using Flickrs free 1tb
makes this look extortionately priced.

------
kbar13
is there a OSX backups solution akin to time machine / arq that takes
advantage of google drive?

~~~
rsync
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...

------
scald
Kryder's law will hold true, but right now that's not enough for me to leave
Dropbox.

------
magic5227
I'm surprised they removed 2tb and everything between 1 and 10tb?

Was this to keep pricing cleaner?

------
cabbeer
Can I get 2TB for $20 or am I forced to get the next tier up? (10TB @$100)

------
izietto
hubiC by OVH offers 10TB for 10€:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7397607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7397607)

------
supercanuck
what features am I losing by switching from Dropbox?

~~~
mikevm
your privacy.

~~~
drdaeman
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
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.

------
taigeair
No mention of Baidu Pan's free 2TB?

------
chris_mahan
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.

~~~
prezjordan
Reminds me of the infamous "Show HN: Dropbox" post. One of the top comments:

> 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.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

~~~
jrockway
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

------
elwell
Just realized title was a pun.

------
gcb0
like what was making me avoid those products was the price/storage ratio...

------
yoavush
Umm.. seems like we'll have no choice but to pay that!

------
woopdy
Triple it.

------
callesgg
Using dropbox somehow feels unprofessional/unsophisticated, google drive does
not.

I can't put my finger on why. But that is how I feel.

