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.
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 care less.
> 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.
That's not too unlikely, if by "Drive" you mean the desktop sync application, which pretty clearly has always been pretty tangential to the strategic purpose of Drive, which is first and foremost a cloud storage platform for web apps (Google first-party apps, institutional customer second-party apps, and ISV third-party apps).
Either way, it would be a shame if Google sank Dropbox and I would resent it. Dropbox is a GREAT service for free, then charges if you like more space. They offer the best use cases around for developers who do a lot of cross device work. You can keep all your information on all testing environments, and even share folders with others (or other accounts) and not really face limitations (i.e. no linux support). And with Google already getting strict about storage on Android, you can only suspect a Chess move to gain control with a dollar 99 on the hook.
Why? Just because Google are going cheap? I'm personally not interested because it's Google. This may surprise many of you, but there are quite a lot of people who simply don trust Google.
> there are quite a lot of people who simply don trust Google.
while I agree with you in principle, there's also quite a lot more people who simply are happy (relieved, even) that they can make the computer help them perform the task they want to accomplish. I'm not even saying that Dropbox or Google is better at this, just that I see people use every day just what's right in front of them and they know they can make work. and because of that they don't seem to have the luxury (even if they have the foresight) of considering what will stick around for longest (or perhaps what's idealistically "right" to choose).
again, I'm not defending this situation. but it does seem (to me) that the majority of people are motivated by this, and cannot afford or consider decisions like whether or not to "simply not trust Google".
I'm not convinced this is a war that will be won on price alone. Nor will it be won on commodity features (i.e. sync).
Google's advantage is that they can slowly eat away at Dropbox's market share by integrating Google Drive with and marketing it through their other products.
Dropbox's advantage is their existing customer base.
In time I think Google's got the upper hand on this one.
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.
I don't see how that's a hard and fast rule. File storage is Dropbox's only business line - if it fails, they're gone. If it helps their other concerns (Gmail, Google Apps) Google can prop up Drive even if its unprofitable.
Gmail and Apps are at best minor contributors to Google's bottom line. If faith in Drive is based on its contribution to them, that Is little reason for that faith to be strong.
> 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.
Depends.
Google might decide to stop supporting it because they want to focus on something else and DropBox might decide to pivot because they can no longer make enough money compared to the costs they incur (especially as Google is slowly squeezing them out of the market with the kind of price slashing we are currently discussing).
Nobody can claim with certainty which of Google or DropBox is more likely to support their product the longest.
Actually the best choice is to store your data with both.
This announcement just made that significantly cheaper, and there's opportunity here for a "cloud RAID" offering to take the hassle out of mirroring one's data. Dropbox already has the API, so they could turn this to their advantage.
I say we support Dropbox for secure storage and dump our images and videos on Google Drive and see how long they store that cheap. Don't just buy a g and throw a few things in there, make them earn this low-balling war.
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.
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.
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.
I would argue drive is better. Not only does it have device syncing like dropbox but it seamlessly integrates with the google ecosystem. And now its much much cheaper.
All these things are true of Drive, though. The only real reason I haven't switched over is, like you, all my stuff is already in Dropbox, and they're pretty much the same thing, so I wouldn't gain that much by switching (I actually use Drive too, but only for its original form, Docs). The new price is a big discount, but we'll have to see if Dropbox moves to match it in some way (they have less room to optimize there, but it's certainly feasible...amazon has been cutting their rates too).
If I was new to the market, though, none of that reasoning really applies.
I get the poart about already having it set up, but is Dropbox usability that different from Google Drive? My phone uploads photos automatically, and the rest seems equally easy to set up.
Ok, it looks like subscriptions. Though it does not allow me to charge my customers who subscribed for Google Checkout.
And it's definitely not the same API as Google Checkout.
None of my customers missed Google Checkout. I got burned by losing subscriptions due to Google Checkout retirement.
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.
I really don't buy this argument. Every specific victim of the slash and burn period at Google was fairly understandably, even if I disagreed with it personally. It was also part of a fairly clear realignment that came with a change in leadership.
Google Drive is such a major part of Google strategy, that it seems remarkably unlikely to suffer the same fate.
And if it does? Google's deprecation and data export policies have on the whole been handled fairly well.
I just see a bunch of people still sulking about Reader and bringing it up at every opportunity. I too was sad to see it go. But Wave? It never got traction and even that was open-sourced instead of just being shuttered. The other examples you give aren't terribly persuasive examples either.
I can think of many smaller companies who've dealt with this much more poorly. I'm fairly complacent about Google on this issue.
I for one LOVED wave and used it every single day. My friends and I spent many months looking for a viable replacement. fwiw we settled on glassboard if anyone else liked wave and never found a suitable replacement.
it doesn't have threaded commenting which is sad, but the mobile apps are much better.
On one hand I support DropBox, because they care about my needs - I'm (also) a Ubuntu Linux user and Google apparently doesn't care about me enough to provide me with a client. Apparently I'm so unimportant to them that they can't justify the cost of a couple of man-months.
On the other hand your worry, while justified, does not apply to Google Drive. Google Drive is now an integral part of:
Yes, they probably don't make much money directly from neither of them, but these represent Google's platform, or lets say Google's own Windows if you will. It's their way of achieving lock-in and protecting against competition that may harm them, as otherwise Google's Search engine which drives the real money from advertising - cannot achieve lock-in on its own. And each of those products need cloud storage and cloud storage is becoming the norm. Microsoft has SkyDrive, integrated with Windows and WinPhone. Apple has iCloud, integrated with OS X and with iOS. Clearly you can see a pattern.
With Google Cloud the only thing I don't trust long term is their pricing - they have a history of releasing cheap or free stuff, earn popularity, earn users, after which they realize that their costs are greater than their earnings and raise those prices. Examples: Google App Engine and Google Apps.
In regards to DropBox, I support them but they really do need to reduce the pricing for those paid accounts. Pretty soon I'll need more than 100 GB and paying $19.99 per month for 200 GB is a little too expensive already, given that after a while I'll need more than 200 GB and then for 500 GB I'll need to pay $50 / month and that's way too much, when Google's 1 TB offer is for $10 / month and would last me for 2-3 years at least.
> I'm (also) a Ubuntu Linux user and Google apparently doesn't care about me enough to provide me with a client. Apparently I'm so unimportant to them that they can't justify the cost of a couple of man-months.
Apparently around half of the 20,000 Google employees use a version of Ubuntu ('Goobuntu'), so I wouldn't say they don't care about Ubuntu...
I don't use Google Drive on any of those platforms (that I'm aware of).
Meanwhile, Picasa integration was strong enough that it took years for me to figure out how to get rid of the screenshots I used on my blog 6 years ago out of the Photos app on my phone. But I wouldn't bet on Picasa being around for the long term.
Basically, I can easily see Google pivoting away from Drive being a sync client and towards some kind of always-online thing with a light local cache.
"Microsoft has SkyDrive, integrated with Windows and WinPhone. Apple has iCloud, integrated with OS X and with iOS. Clearly you can see a pattern."
This is exactly the case for staying with Dropbox. Otherwise, your cloud provider has more leverage to lock you into their products. Dropbox is motivated to support multiple platforms.
For what it's worth, SkyDrive has sync engines on both Windows and Mac while having apps + auto picture upload on Android, iPhone and of course Windows Phone.
SkyDrive doesn't support Ubuntu Linux either. Basically I'm sick and tired of feeling unimportant to these companies. Why can Dropbox deliver an Ubuntu Linux client, while Google and Microsoft feel that's an unjustified cost?
I mean, skipping over Linux users that are a significant chunk of the market if you ask me, but lets assume for a moment that Linux home users don't pay much for their software or whatever. What about governments that have adopted Linux? What about Linux being the most popular OS for servers? What about Linux being used in the educational system, like with Raspberry Pi?
And even for yourself, lets say that you'd want to do your own backups of your Skydrive or Google Drive and so you quickly setup your own home Linux box that should synchronize your account. Surprise - you're not important enough.
This is platform lock-in, pure and simple. Microsoft is no better than Google. Don't get me started on Skype ;-)
>Why can Dropbox deliver an Ubuntu Linux client, while Google and Microsoft feel that's an unjustified cost?
Because for Google and Microsoft, their services are cloud storage components of their strategic platforms, and support for other platforms is, where it exists at all (e.g., Drive's desktop sync application), a way to ease migration off of those platforms and into the vendor's strategic platform, whereas for Dropbox, the file storage is the strategic product.
Of course, that's why neither Google nor Microsoft need their storage products to make profit directly for them to be valuable.
> This is platform lock-in, pure and simple.
With Drive, which has an API on which third party can build sync apps for other platforms, I don't think its lock in. Its just a matter of prioritizing a tool whose business purpose is customer acquisition for the platforms where the most potential customers are.
I know, I know, it comes integrated with Win8.1, but you can't use a local account, and your options to use SkyDrive with a local account are just nasty workarounds:
Yes but once you do have an account, I would say its the best file sync platform available. It never downloads the files until you click on them however it always displays all your files. No initial sync time and no taking up space for files you will never use. Its also safer because the majority of your files are never stored locally.
Managing your risks is fair, but it's not clear that Google Drive is less reliable than Dropbox.
1) Google Drive is a fundamental part of their online office suite, which means it's used internally for day-to-day employee work. Reader, Wave, Finance didn't get that status. Not to mention that having paid enterprise plans means it's a bit more mature than other things.
2) In 5 years, Dropbox could very well be referred to as "the discontinued Yahoo! Dropbox" or something similar. Not easy to predict that either.
Risk A) Google might end support for Drive. They've shown that , if they do, they'll give a lot of notice. You'll have an opportunity to move your files elsewhere.
Risk B) Dropbox goes out of business. Most likely because Google is undercutting their prices by about 90%. If you are lucky, they give some notice. They also might just send everyone home and shut off the lights, like many companies do when they file for bankruptcy.
1. do you really think that dropbox sends everyone home and shuts off the lights? That's a joke and you know it.
2. These files are all on our computers. I suspect that if dropbox blows up and does just go home and shut off the lights, we'll hear about it and notice. We can then take those files and move them to google drive or whatever.
Yes. As we all know, removing a feature from an existing, still-supported product is exactly the same as discontinuing a product entirely without notice.
Sets in spreadsheets still works for me. Edit: When the feature was "retired", there was a note that it would be replaced with a better version. https://support.google.com/drive/answer/3543688
> I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time?
And how do you know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years? They can't:
a) Go out of business, or
b) Be acquired and have the service shutdown, or
c) Have some new application of the core technology become more profitable, pivot to that as their prime focus, and discontinue the existing service retaining the infrastructure for that new application.
> Google Groups used to be huge, now to get to them you must click Apps -> More -> Even more from Google -> Scroll to the bottom of the page.
Or just type "Groups" in the Google search bar, and its the first result.
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.
I live in the Bay Area and I pay about $800/year for 120KB/s upload
Well, that's terrible and you are no doubt aware of that. I live in Philadelphia and pay $74.95 per month for Unlimited home phone service, Prime TV channel lineup and 75 Mbps downstream and 35 Mbps upstream unlimited Internet through Verizon FIOS.
I currently use both Dropbox and OneDrive but this pricing is ridiculously cheap. I've been purposely holding back on the things I back up onto cloud because of its costs but if competitors don't follow suit I'll be switching. The main thing I haven't been backing up in the cloud are the ~ 400 GB of home movies I have.
And then I did the math and realised I pay $1735.54 per year for my cable Internet...
300 down / 20 up with a 1 TB cap doesn't come cheap when no competition exists at those speeds. If it were even offered in my area, fibre from the same company is north of $3000/year, and for that all I get is symmetric uplink.
Still, at 300 down, 1 TB = 8388608 mbits / 300 mbits/s = 466 minutes or just under 8 hours. And luckily, my monthly cap is 1 TB. (Also lucky: I don't download 24/7 to hit that cap in under 8 hours.)
Yeah. I noticed that too -- if a site is slow, I now either blame the location-unaware Google DNS (because of crappy ISP-provided DNS) or I know to blame the site. Even if I hardcode an alkamai address for my favourite streaming site, the only way I get to top speed is by 802.11ac when my Nexus 5 is cooperating (it really likes the stability of G or N) or by plugging in with gigabit Ethernet. But wow, it makes the Internet at work seem blazing slow. A reverse from the 90s, eh? ;-)
Funny. I would have thought more people on HN would chime in with plans $100+. Of course it also makes it harder for me to shop for a dedicated server -- since I really want gigE or 10gigE to serve things fast enough to myself. And the sad truth is I know I'll see 600-1.2gbits over copper before I see fiber optics. I give it another 2-3 years tops. (Why? I'm already hooked up locally to 600mbps, but they only use half right now.) I just hope prices don't double again, as 5 years ago this plan was nearly half off for half the speed.
That said, I'd pay the same to Google Fiber if they chose Toronto next year (yes, I know it's near double), just so I could have a proper, local DNS service from my ISP with no search hijacking. Is it too much to ask a telco for respect to go along with speed?
As residential users we are I think prone to forget how much cheaper and faster our unreliable async connections are in comparison to business broadband.
a t1 was "fast" about 15 years ago, so if you learned a tiny bit about business class internet right around when you were 20 like I did, that's how fast a connection would have been around then.
If it's so incredibly expensive where you live, then you probably aren't using online file storage in the first place.
And yes it can take a long time, but you might swap cloud providers every 2-5 years, you're not doing it every day. Even if it still takes a month to copy all your files, that's generally an unattended process, so it's not such a big deal.
I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's not a huge deal. All things considered, it's pretty easy to switch.
Not to enter the Google v Dropbox argument, but with data caps, it's easy to slowly build up a lot of backed up data that you cannot really retrieve all at once.
Not to enter that argument either, but whatever cloud storage service you use, you should be storing your data there as well as on at least one local hard disk, not instead of.
You don't need to download locally, rent a server for ~50$ 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.
If Google Drive is getting shuttered, no doubt their competitors will immediately implement "Google Drive importers" using the API, if they don't have them already.
I don't take it as scaremongering, but I'd add that the switch cost from drive to dropbox is pretty low. Google will announce if it's going to close drive, and in the meantime you're paying some fractional percent of what dropbox charges.
If google shutters it, it's not like copying a bunch of files from one place to another and waiting for it to auto-sync is a difficult endeavor.
(right now my money is on Yahoo! acquiring db to better compete with Google...but the price might be too high).
When has Google ever closed a service that they haven't given you plenty of time and great capability to export all of your data? Not arguing their history of closing services but I'm currently paying $200.00 to Dropbox a year and can convert to Google and pay 48 bucks.
If something happens they decide to close it in the future I'll get my data pulled down and get into another service...but until then I'll be happy to keep my 150 bucks a year!
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.
One reason I picked Crashplan (same price, $60 a year) over Backblaze (this might not apply to most people) is that Crashplan doesn't remove your deleted files if you use the option. That allowed me to backup several hundred DVDs of data to Crashplan simply by copying them to my hard drive, syncing them, then deleting them again.
And replaced with Google Wallet which is, at least as a user, the exact same thing or better and exists on more platforms. That one isn't really a surprise.
> Why should I be more comfortable letting Google back up my stuff instead of Dropbox?
You refer to Dropbox and Google Drive as backup solutions. When I evaluated Dropbox, I read that they offer an addon named Packrat that turns their popular file synchronization service into an actual backup solution. Does Google now offer a similar addon for Google Drive? If not, Google Drive isn't a backup solution. And without Packrat, neither is Dropbox.
Does it matter? If Dropbox turned the lights out tomorrow, I wouldn't lose any data, my files would just stop syncing across machines. I'd just have to install a new file sync client and point it to my Dropbox folder.
The barriers to switching away from Dropbox are based more on the number of products with Dropbox API integrations, and not on the switching costs for file sync.
That's pretty wild. I didn't renew my Dropbox Pro account since it was by far my most expensive backup option.
I've got my Drobo that's been my Time Machine thingy for the past 5 years. I've got iCloud for recent-ish stuff. I've got Backblaze for long-term storage at $5/month (or whatever).
I had to pick and chose what to put on Dropbox and it was the most expensive option.
With Google Drive I can go back to that pricing, but no longer have to pick and choose and still get the (infrequently used, but convenient) drag & drop sharing between devices.
The sad decline of Google Finance from best in class to also-ran is really depressing. I use Yahoo Finance now, which includes an outrageously easy API.
I kind of like knowing that Google abandons certain markets and that other people have a chance at making some money in that space. It always seems intuitive to me that Google could just crush any business they want with a weekend of coding, but it apparently isn't true, and I like that.
Google has shut down many more services than Reader. I am not certain why you choose to highlight only Reader as if that's the one thing Google has ever shut down. Even of the things Google hasn't shut down, many have been "wound down", with no updates or even bug fixes, until eventually being replaced by something only half-related with no upgrade path. The "more wood behind fewer arrows" thing kind of became a meme for a while, so the fact that people (it isn't just you) latch on to one example they've heard of as if the constant shutterings don't happen is highly strange. Even key properties that seem highly embedded in numerous products (Checkout) get this treatment, so it isn't like anything is immune.
Okay? This is still just someone trying to punish Google for something they feel otherwise powerless to stop, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the likelihood of it happening to Drive itself.
Unprofitable? Really? It's one of the most successful (if not the most successful one?) Y combinator companies (it's not a startup anymore). PG said it was a black swan. Besides, what do I care whether Google will exist? We are talking about Google Drive, and we know very well it could be gone just like that.
> Except for the fact that it is integrated in gmail, google plus, android and probably some other services I forgot.
Its central to the "Chrome everywhere" / Chrome web store / Chromebook strategy, and central to Google Apps for Business (both because "Drive" subsumed the office suite that used to be "Docs & Spreadsheets", and because its a platform for second/third-party apps for Apps users.)
But the Drive desktop sync application is pretty peripheral to any of those things that provide confidence that Drive itself will hang around for a long time -- so if people are thinking of Drive primarily as a desktop sync solution and worrying that Google might cancel that, well, that's probably not as unlikely as the idea that Google is likely to cancel Drive itself anytime in the forseeable future.
If you're only in it for the storage, I don't find it to be important whether or not Google Drive will eventually be shuttered—there is a very little barrier to switch to another provider if the need arises. Google has a good track record for letting you get your data out in such a case.
I have more confidence that Drive is here to stay because of one fact: an entire line of computers (Chromebooks) rely on Drive solely for their storage. At this point, abandoning Drive would be abandoning a lot of other things. This was never true for your list of Google chopping block apps.
I don't think you should worry about the reliability of Google "wanting," users to host their content. Considering Google builds one of the most extensive, profitable, and privacy scaring profile on each IP address, MAC address, and user of any of their services for free.
The simple fact that Google can get paid for a service that only helps them further their profiling and profitability in ads and Chrome OS is more reason for them to offer the service.
I don't question reliability. I question privacy, and until Dropbox makes their NSA agreement (which I remember reading they didn't)...Dropbox is my goto!
I bet that Drive will still be around in 5 years because Docs relies on it. If Google wants to continue pushing Chromebooks, they need Docs and therefore Drive.
Fair point, Google does abandon projects. Although I think that Google is very focused on the cloud, it's a key market for them now and likely in the future. I think nothing is future proof but Google Drive is likely just as good of a bet as the others.
Worst case, you know Google will give you plenty of options and time to select a new provider if they did indeed shut down Google Drive.
Google Checkout was a paid solution which google shutdown, leaving merchants stuck looking for alternatives. The fact you're paying for a solution from google (or anyone for that matter) doesn't ensure continued survival of the solution
Didn't exactly shut it down like they did with reader or others though. It was replaced by another product, Google Wallet. Reader received no replacement from Google.
Google Drive has been around in some way/shape/form for a long time, I don't think it's going anywhere. And I doubt Google is going anywhere soon (it's probably going to survive five years even if it gets disrupted).
The big losers here will be Dropbox, HubiC, Box, etc. who will feel price pressure.
There is a bit of debate who is more likely to shut down below. I can't answer than myself but if Google did shutdown Drive it would likely be because they want out of the market and would give a long warning. If Dropbox left the market it would probably be because they can't afford to keep the doors open and may close in a hurry if this did happen.
Either way I like the competition and whichever one has better security would be my preference. But in terms of shutting down I think it's important to consider how they would shut down if they did, as much as 'if they would'.
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 OS. The Nexus line is so that high-end influencers can show their friends how awesome their phone is, so that mainstream customers think "I want an Android phone" and not "I want an iPhone" and then can go buy from a wide variety of vendors if the Nexus itself doesn't fit their price range.
It was pretty much the same story with Windows - as long as Apple was a viable competitor PC clones were pretty decent, but once Apple started going down the tubes you started getting bargain-basement Windows machines loaded up with crapware. The Apple/Google rivalry has been really good for consumers, as Apple forces Google to get better at user experience while Google forces Apple to be more open and support standards.
It's silly to worry about the risk of Google abandoning something as strategically important to them as Drive, when there's an infinitely greater risk of you losing all your storage because your account gets disabled. This is something that happens infrequently but still routinely, and for sometimes quite innocent reasons, with rather little recourse in the case it was a mistake on Google's part (let alone for the case where there's a legitimate reason they blocked your account).
At what (little) it does, Dropbox does it very well, but for what little it does, I would definitely not call it cheap. Well worth it for some people, but very marginal for others like myself. I'm not aware of any new features coming out of Dropbox in well over a year, and there are many they could easily add, so as a matter of principle, I would change to a competitor provided their feature set and performance was at least as good, at the same or lower price..
Well, a cloud storage is central to the ecosystem they are trying to build, think of Chromebooks. It's not a periferic product like Reader or experiment like Wave.
There is no guarantee of course, in theory it could be replaced by a rebranded product with a completely incompatible API later on; but I doubt it would happen because it looks like Google already went through a spring cleaning of products, with the explicit aim of killing dying, orphaned products in order to strengthen the core products.
Everyone has spent time arguing which service will exist in five years. If you like Google's offering now (and I do as it's cheaper and more integrated with my workflow), then use it. Even if Google shutters it and Dropbox prevails, I'm positive they would give advanced notice. At that point, switch to Dropbox. We're acting like this is some kind of lifelong decision, but it's more importantly about what is best right now.
> I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time?
Dropbox could be acquired and shuttered (or worse, data-mined). Google - much less likely, though it does have a tendency to close projects it does't see as strategic.
I'd say the risks are equivalent. Hedge your bets, use multiple services and secure it all with something like Boxcryptor.
Even if google were to shutter this in 5 years, there's not _that_ high of a cost to switching. In the end, it's just your files. You can move them.
I'm more concerned with whether their software is any good. I tried it a while ago and it didn't even come to close to dropbox even in terms of syncing, let alone the other things that dropbox has done.
> I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time?
Feel free to quote me on this: Dropbox will not be Dropbox in five years. It will have been acquired, gone out of business, or at least slipped into irrelevance.
Dropbox does not stand a chance against competitors like Google, Microsoft or Apple.
Google Drive is being monetized - that's the difference. Neither Reader, nor Wave, nor Finance nor a dozen other Google products were/are monetized, so they're the first to go when managements decides so.
If Drive is used by paid users, I think it won't go away anytime soon, just like Google Cloud or Gmail.
> What scares me more are the ones that are visibly on the chopping block. You can see their agony from space.
I'd toss google scholar into the ones you listed as well.
A fantastic search tool, but (unless I'm missing something) it's completely buried away on their site.
1. Dropbox has a high potential to be acquired by a big company when the price is right.
2. Cloud storage service is something that you don't need to be attached to. Use Google till it's good. The day it isn't, simply switch to Dropbox or whatever.
Is it really so hard to take the 30 day notice (or more) they would give you and actually download your stuff locally? Or, better yet, just let Google Drive operate in the mode it installs with which keeps local copies of everything anyway?
I kind of agree with simonsarris. You take a risk if you rely on a company's product if that company doesn't rely on that product to stay in business. Dropbox lives and dies by its storage feature; Google doesn't.
> You take a risk if you rely on a company's product if that company doesn't rely on that product to stay in business.
You take a risk even if it does, because a company can change their business focus, or it can go out of business, or it can be acquired by another company that doesn't rely on the product, even if the acquired company did, and you have no control over any of those contingencies.
You still own your files. If they shut down just get another service and check them in there ? If you don't have local copies it's a risk regardless of who you go with.
Google will not drop Drive because it goes along with their almost web only OS, Chrome OS. And many other services are leaning on drive, +, picasa, gmail, android apps, etc...
Google (or read Company X with deep pockets) offers Dropbox N billion dollars and then Dropbox is no longer Dropbox that you are hoping to see in coming 5 years.
* no cloud service is guaranteed to exist in 5 years.
* in case any of these services are shut down, it is very likely that they give you the option to download your stuff and use it in another service.
Maybe you disagree with his reasoning. Maybe his reasoning is illogical or misguided. But dismissing something as FUD without providing any sort of counter arguments or reasoning is worse than being wrong.
I don't think it's FUD, adn I don't agree with the approach of 'it's free, so you have no say in it.' I wish that if a service was not working for a publisher (and therefore not getting any more development $) there were a protocol to either open-source it or offer it on a subscription basis with a public minimum target that needed to be reached to justify ongoing operation in its current form (eg Reader, which worked fine for many people).
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.
Same position here. Ignoring the whole Google/privacy stuff, Drive seems fundamentally broken.
In my case it's things like if you need to replace a file it's luck as to if it syncs or not. First you copy it in place, but it renames the copy you just put there (no option to just replace it) so you learn to delete the thing first, but no, you'll replace it and the sync engine didn't seem smart enough to realise the file had actually changed, and you would end up with either the old file left on the server or worse it would pick up the delete operation and forget the replacement.
This was a few months ago, but that's still long after the service had been out in the wild. The concept of these cloud storage things, especially once proper APIs are available and we can switch storage providers independently of app providers, is a good one, but GDrive doesn't seem to get the fundamentals right.
Google Drive desktop client does have issues (Mac). However, the worst pile of junk is the Box.com client; even with their paid business plans the uploads are unimaginably slow. I searched and found long support threads on forums complaining about this problem. Quickly abandoned Box and remain perplexed at all the hype behind that company.
Dropbox is the best overall; has the best web interface and desktop client. Google Drive is second, but because more of my clients are familiar with, and already have, Google accounts, and I pay for Google Apps already, I use Google Drive.
I didn't used GDrive enough to see your problems but for me, the missing "right clic" -> "copy public link" to get a DIRECT link on a public file is what's stopping me from even considering it as an alternative to Dropbox.
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.
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.
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.
I agree. Due to the lack of throttling, I had to write a script that paused Google Drive any time I was using the computer - just to have network and CPU resources to do simple things like browse the web (and this was on a fairly recent, fast machine). I tried to make it work... I really did.
I, too, would appreciate a lot more focus on the desktop client.
For me, it would be a matter of selective folder synching. Right now, you have to sync the entire drive. My Air only has 128GB SSD. I just want to sync a couple work folders, not my entire 70GB of stored files.
Unfortunately, Google's direction is pretty clear and I expect they'll discontinue support for the Desktop client before they ever enhance it.
It is exactly because of these reasons that they are dropping the cost. They clearly know that they don't have a market share. I stopped using GD exactly due to the reasons you mentioned above, and I am not going back at any cost!
3. No block level sync. This is a big deal for me since I use big encrypted files (block cipher). They work flawlessly with Dropbox. Incremental changes = incremental update.
Point 2 is a common theme with Google Drive, Dropbox and others. Tested only on hexacore dev machines with SSD backed RAM disks, their moron developers thought it prudent to just absolutely trash the system with harddisk IO on boot, presumably to find out that nothing has changed, as a simple timestamp check could have told them.
True - most do some heavy IO when first launched. I've tested syncing modest amounts of data with Google Drive, Dropbox, Box.net, as well as backups with Dolly Drive, CrashPlan and Arq. In my experience, none of the other clients come close in terms of sustained CPU usage during the entire process like Google Drive does.
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.
"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). "
i.e. if we store data there, we are using their service and we are giving Google "rights of ownership" permanently even after we stop using their service in future. It is definitely not good.
How can anyone give license of their personal stuff to third party?
It will be better if there is a standalone storage service which just stores,backups securely and forgets us when we opt out of their service. As far as I understand, Google drive won't fit in there. Their appetite for our personal information for advertising is not comforting.
If I misunderstood their terms, I am willing to change.
> How 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.
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?
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.
This is CYA boilerplate for all services and sounds worse than it is.
1.
Reproduce = spread your data on multiple regions/drives/computers/etc inside their data storage systems
Modify = format changes
Create derivative works = automatic translation, format changes etc
publish = show your files to people
publicly perform = show your files to people (for video)
publicly display = show your files to people (images)
distribute = show your files to people
2. Because their datacenter cannot delete files instantly, another CYA point that prevents people from unsubscribing and suing if their files don't disappear the same instant they click the button.
All of that is just shitty legalese that attempts to prevent frivolous lawsuits, and every time some engineer takes it literally and assumes the worst.
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.
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.
> 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.
> > 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?
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.
Isn't Amazon S3 $0.085 / GB for the first TB/month (1/10 of what you've said)?
That's still 8.5x Google Drive. Being competitive with glacier jives with what I've heard the underlying cost of storage hardware is (still with room for profit). However, from what I hear running the request serving on top of that is fairly expensive (which is why glacier has big restrictions).
AWS says they're a cost plus org which means they drop prices as their costs drop. But that plus can be quite large.
Being #1, first to market, etc. has a big advantage. Despite knowing (or believing) these things, my org still happily spends plenty at AWS.
When you talk about Glacier, you must remember there's no instant access to files and there's bandwidth costs associated with downloading your files. The price for storage may be the same but the overall costs of Glacier are much higher.
This is a big reason why service like Dropbox and Google Drive work so well. If two or more people have the same exact file in their drive, it doesn't take up more physical storage than the original file.
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.
For a while, I had Google Drive and Dropbox. That was when Gdrive was $5 for 100GB, and that price couldn't make me switch.
Seriously, Gdrive does not measure up to Dropbox. The Dropbox client is so, SO much lighter on system resources than the Gdrive client, it's stupid. I've had Gdrive end up sitting on 300+Mb of data while Dropbox happily ran with 50Mb.
As well, Google Drive has exactly one mode: on. There is next to no configuration, which led to some humorous situations.
At one point, I took down all the bandwidth at a Hackathon because Gdrive wanted to sync a bunch of files, and there's no way to limit network activity.
I do not like Gdrive, and honestly I don't feel like I need it. Their main selling point is cheapness, but my working data-footprint is only about 40GB, which fits nicely within my Dropbox account (and on my very small SSD's). I don't need, nor could I use 1TB of online space.
I am moving about 5 gigs worth of data from Box to GD. No glitches, no hogging. GD is taking about 62 Mb of memory and is pretty consistent around there.
Now I'm a (traditional?) dropbox user, using dropbox as a synchronized folder between various computers combined with a remote backup. All I would need to do to transfer is send a few links to people to my new shared stuff (folder / album )
My only technical issue with transfer is actually transferring the file from Dropbox to Google ( 1 MBps upload ) and getting all the machine synchronized.
What keeps me on Dropbox is a few years of flawless reliability. I still remember the dark times of syncing before dropbox, YMMV, but I intent for losing files, silent conflict, ... to stay a thing of the past.
However, first it was https://hubic.com/en/offers/, now Google. Even box.com is significantly cheaper. In a few months, that will be difficult to ignore, I hope dropbox is listening.
Small use case to address your first question, but that I used all the time in school (and occasionally now at work): because everyone had the Dropbox client installed we would just create a shared folder that we'd all contribute to. Maybe only a couple of people ever had the Google sync client installed, and it was a lot more friction to upload/download files all the time.
On the converse, whenever we collaborated on an actual text document or presentation, we'd turn to Google Docs to do it, then when finished convert it into Word/PPT and stick it in Dropbox.
DropBox client is better, DropBox web interface is easier to use and syncing is faster. I've had many issues with GDrive in the past that led me to stop using it abandon it and go back to DropBox. Sync issues, some files just refused to upload/sync, memory usage, speed, battery killer ... DropBox for me.
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).
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.
I think what he means by that is "even if it was free, I still wouldn't switch". And from free the only way they could make the price even better would be to pay him.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Storing in another city or house is too much hassle for me. A buried drive (waterproof container), and DropBox, both storing only TrueCrypt-encrypted files except for pix. If the NSA still reads it, oh well it's non-incriminating anyway.
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.
I use InSync (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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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/). 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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...?
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.
If you don't use cloud storage then the product clearly isn't for you, but I'm paying (on the same $5/yr for 20GB plan as you) $0.02/GB every month and with the 1TB plan could be paying $0.01/GB. This is a fantastic deal you can't find anywhere else on the internet (except a couple options like amazon glacier and backblaze which don't let you access all of that data immediately)
Well, Google gives you 15GB for free, Seeing as you're only using 10GB, not sure why you're paying, especially as you seem to be quite price sensitive.
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.
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), 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!
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
I would imagine hosting vast amounts of crawl data and email would give them plenty of experience building inexpensive storage at scale. Giving people vast amounts of space for email also gives them plenty of data on how much space people are likely to actually use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....)
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I'm not sure those you refer to as Google breaking a "social contract" with would be better off with a sorta-Google-sorta-startup-reader. It seems like Reader shutting down was great for the startup ecosystem, and they made it really easy for that to happen. I don't know of a compelling argument to choose Reader over that.
I mean, just speaking in terms of a business move, Google's track record ain't great with these types of services. There must be a better way than dumping them like that.
What I heard or read somewhere about Reader is that they couldn't find internal champions, and that's why it died. NOT because it was losing money.
Then again, Google+ is a better business for them than RSS.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
I've had problems with file integrity and sync issues with GDrive. Files wouldn't upload/sync for some reason. Hence why I went back to DropBox after some time. DB is also faster for me (perceived speed, didn't time it).
Local sync over local network with DropBox comes in really handily sometimes.
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.
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.
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.
Since then it's gotten even easier. Just buy a couple of NAS drives (or a couple of Raspberry Pi with external hard drives), setup OwnCloud, that's it (note have recommended doubling the hardware used to ensure multiple backups).
I use Dropbox but I used the AdWords trick to give myself 20GB space on the free account, which is ample for me. If I thought I would need one of the pricier options I'd see very little reason not to spend about an hour of my time to build an OwnCloud solution. Oh and it has support for iOS/Android for those that are interested... https://owncloud.com/products/mobileapps
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.
The guy is right; calculate it through. I did with consumer priced hardware (they can probably get it at near manufacturing costs because of the huge volume) and they still seem to be making a fair bit of profit.
This is still not practical for my use.
It is a bit like Lease vs Buy for automobiles IMO.
I recently bought 2x2tb drives for $75 each and a 2 bay Synology NAS for $150. Now I have redundancy (mirroring), online access, much faster access to my data, faster backups, And it was dead simple to setup and configure (web based configuration tool, and tool-less hardware).
Best of all the data is not subject to surveillance and pilfering.
It will take around 15 months before I will break even for my investment (vs Google drive prices), but I believe that it was worth the small amount of extra time spent and the up front spending.
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.