Cloud storage – we all have our favourite service and it generally comes down to Dropbox, Box or Google Drive based on your personal preference for which services are offered. But with Google’s latest price drop on cloud storage, the choice may be a little harder.
The new pricing scheme brings Google drive down to a pretty impressive price for a lot of storage. All Google customers currently get a total of 15GB of storage to start off with, this is used for GMail for all your mail, attachments etc, Drive and of course if you use the service – Google+ Photos. Any Google Drive updates you purchase will simply be added on top of this, to top up your space in those areas.
The new pricing looks like this 100GB of additional Drive storage will cost US$1.99 per month (previously $4.99), while a full Terabyte of storage will cost a mere US$9.99 per month (previously $49.99), and if that’s not enough you can get 10TB of Google Drive storage for US$99.99 per month with options to get even larger amounts of Drive storage if you REALLY need it – 20TB for US$199.99 per month or 30TB for $299.99 per month.
This stacks up pretty well against the competition – Dropbox offers a 2GB minimum but offers the opportunity to update this for free if you can refer new users to their service. Or if you want to pay, you can upgrade to :
- 100GB for US$9.99 per month/US$99 per year.
- 200GB for US$19.99 per month/US$199 per year.
- 500GB for US$49.99 per month/US$499 per year.
Of course they have a Business account options from $15 per month for 5 users(i.e US$75 per month) which offers ‘Unlimited storage’.
Box is another option which is popular, regular signups are given 10GB of storage, however with any number of offers available at any one time you’d be hard pressed not to end up with at least 50GB of storage free. Options to update to 100GB of storage start at US$10 per month and they too have business options available starting at $15 per month for 1000GB of strorage.
Sugarsync is another online service which is recommended by a number of people and offers options based on a yearly payment. You can trial it for 30 days but appears fairly costly once that time is up :
- 60GB US$74.99 per year.
- 100GB US$99.99 per year.
- 250GB US$249 per year.
- 500GB US$399 per year.
Microsoft too offers cloud storage, their SkyDrive OneDrive service offers 7GB of storage straight up with options to add on more from there. Their update to 20GB also includes Office365 access :
So, as you can see, there’s options, but these new Google Drive options certainly appear attractive. If you’re not sure of how much storage you currently use in Google Drive, you can head across to the Storage Purchase page to check out your current usage, and also purchase an upgrade if you find you need it.
There’s also Amazon Glacier for much cheaper rates per month, albeit not sync’d with what PC/devices
For me, the problem now exists with access to decent speeds. Cloud storage is great for backing up critical files (especially family photos), as well as having access to files between work and home without external storage, but I can’t see myself putting gigabytes on gigabytes of data there without access to some phat pipes. My agricultural grade ADSL just doesn’t cut it. $2/mth for 100gb of storage is fantastic no matter what way you look at it. For small business in Australia, economy like this means a company can back up their files on-the-line without infrastructure being a real… Read more »
Hard to say no to office 365. unless you need massive amounts, and who really apart from a business would need it, the inclusion of Office and storage is hard to beat. Well for me anyway, I find google apps etc less than inspiring and their email offering just wrong.
Definitely a personal opinion – I’ve found the opposite. But different strokes etc.
Absolutely Daniel, that’s why competition is great. For personal use Google Apps is great when free but we used it for work and it failed. Moved to office 365 and much better.
For me personally I had a lot of issues with Gmail and their implementation of SMTP etc, I had issues with every email sent was also sent back to me and magic moving of emails to my important email folder, I set no rule and yet Google moved all emails to that folder. It was only meant for important emails.