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Google cloud storage pooled across services

by Mark Tyson on 14 May 2013, 13:00

Tags: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

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Google has announced the pooling of the available cloud storage for users of its services including Gmail, Drive and Google+ Photos. Now instead of having an allocation of 10GB for Gmail and the comparatively small amount of 5GB available to your Drive documents and Google+ photos you will have 15GB of storage to use willy-nilly.

Free is the magic word, now we hope that DropBox and Microsoft SkyDrive will react.

Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management at Google, wrote on the Google Drive Blog; “With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where. For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.”

This is a welcome user-friendly move by Google as the separate walled storage divided between Google’s integrated online services “doesn’t make as much sense anymore,” says Bavor.

We are also informed that the Google Drive Storage Page will be updated to provide a handy visual pie chart breakdown of your cloud storage usage. Such charts provide a quick and easy way to see how much storage you are using and what is using up your available space. This is also a page where Google will try and tempt you to pay for a storage space upgrade for a monthly fee.

click to zoom-in

Pooled storage will be implemented soon

The cloud storage pool upgrade “will roll out over the next couple of weeks”. It hasn’t happened for my Google account yet. Also let’s hope this indirect storage upgrade to Google Drive positively influences rivals such as DropBox and Microsoft SkyDrive to upgrade their free usage limits.



HEXUS Forums :: 12 Comments

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I like this idea.
Glad to hear it, although it comes as a slight (pleasant) surprise for the cynic in me TBH. The 5GB storage space is fairly easy to fill for many people, while very few people will come even remotely close to the 10GB email quota, so they could've offered essentially anything for headline numbers while knowing only a few outliers will actually take advantage of it.

However, I can see this causing problems for some less careful users - what happens if you're unaware of the change and fill your quota with photos or something? Will it end up bouncing emails or will Google, being Google, give you a bit of leniency then shout at you next time you log on?
Good point watercooled. Hopefully they won't let you fill the 15Gb up just with drive content. Would love to know what happens though as I use gmail/drive a lot.
Each to his own, I guess, and I'm sure lots of people will like this.

Me? I'm indifferent to whether it's “walled off” or common, 15GB or 15TB, free or paid for, I am not storing my data on Google. Or for that matter, on an MS Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud, or any other flavour of airborne accumulation of water vapour. Not now, not ever. It's staying carefully under my control, where both privacy and security, and who gets access, are determined solely by me, and the security I implement, and the locks on my windows, and doors, not some US MegaCorp's privacy policy and T&C's.

As I say, each to his own, but for me, no way, no how.
I don't see it as a major problem provided you categorise what you want to store, but yeah I wouldn't be trusting anything private to the ‘cloud’. I don't mind stuff like this for sharing/storing non-private stuff, and there's always encryption if you want to use it as backup space.