Google Significantly Reduces Google Drive Prices, Tempts You to Jump Into the Cloud

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Just as local, physical storage has since its inception, cloud storage and its accompanying infrastructures are becoming larger, more robust and cheaper as time goes on. Case in point: this past week, Google decided to bring down its Google Drive cloud storage solution pricing to insanely low prices, while increasing capacity at the same time.

Competing directly with Dropbox, the decision is a pretty obvious attempt to get customers to move over to the Google service. You can see the new price-points in the infographic below. For reference, 100GB used to cost $5/month, 1TB used to cost $50/month and the max was 16TB for $800/month. Now you can go as high as 30TB for only $300/month.

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If you were already a paying user of Google Drive, your storage has been updated to reflect the new pricing scheme (not the other way around). And, as has been the case since 2012, your Google Drive storage space still works across Drive, Mail and Google+ Photos.

If the prices interest you and you’d like to take the dive and set up a cloud archive, you can head on over to Google’s sign-up page and select the storage/pricing scheme that suits you best.

Speaking specifically to the use of cloud storage for photography, the only thing inhibiting many of us from keeping all of our photos in the cloud is Internet bandwidth. With 25MB raw files being the norm now for many cameras, it’s still not quite feasible to properly store and access a full shoot worth of photos in and from the cloud.

Take Google Fiber, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2.0 for example. Touted as the fastest Internet available (although availability is extremely slim), Fiber comes in at a bandwidth of 1,000mb/s, approximately 1/5th of what USB 3.0 maxes out at, and around 1/20th of the speed of Thunderbolt 2.0).

So, truth be told, realistic 100% cloud-based storage and access for your photo archive is likely years away. But that doesn’t mean Google’s new, extremely affordable options shouldn’t tempt you to use the cloud in collaboration with local storage. It never hurts to have yet another backup.

(via Google)

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