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Google Drive cloud storage service spotted on the horizon

by Alistair Lowe on 9 February 2012, 10:09

Tags: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

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Long rumoured, the Wall Street Journal is now claiming that Google's 'Drive' cloud service is pending for imminent release.

The service is expected to provide free entry-level cloud storage for the casual user and as a hook for potential customers, with the commercial service expected to undercut start-ups such Dropbox, who offer packages starting at 50GB for £6.50 per month.

'Drive' isn't Google's first foray into the realm of cloud storage, with Google's 'G Drive' as a concept the firm tinkered around with several years back. Since then, bandwidth and storage have both come down in cost and increased in availability, with the cloud storage market now a competitive and growing entity, it does feel as though the time is right for Google to enter along with the rest of the herd and, unlike other services, who rent resources from datacentre firms such as Amazon Webservices, Google will be able to bring to market a highly competitive offering that sits on its own data-network infrastructure.

Whilst WSJ stated that the service was scheduled for imminent release, it couldn't confirm if this was to be weeks or months, however the feeling is very much that the service is coming and, it's coming soon. We look forward to seeing just what Google will have to offer us.



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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The service is expected to provide free entry-level cloud storage for the casual user and as a hook for potential customers, with the commercial service expected to undercut start-ups such Dropbox, who offer packages starting at 50GB for £6.50 per month.
£5/month (or less) for 50GB would interest me - this could be very interesting. Although at the moment I'd be more interested in a low-cost cloud-based backup service.

Although I guarantee that this'll be seen in some quarters as yet another attempt by Google to inveigle themselves into another aspect of the computing landscape and then take it over.
£5 a month is £260 per year. Put in those stark economic terms you might find yourself better off buying a small form portable USB drive (which would also give you considerably more than 50Gb) and lugging it around with you. The entry price might need to be a wee bit lower.
BongoJoe
£5 a month is £260 per year. Put in those stark economic terms you might find yourself better off buying a small form portable USB drive (which would also give you considerably more than 50Gb) and lugging it around with you. The entry price might need to be a wee bit lower.

£5 x 12 months = £60 a year
Google late to the party again? Is this going to be another Buzz type flop?

Dropbox is spot on for most folk, however there privacy policy change last year was a bit suspect, but other then that it suits most need perfectly fine, the software has always been hassle free too.
BongoJoe
£5 a month is £260 per year. Put in those stark economic terms you might find yourself better off buying a small form portable USB drive (which would also give you considerably more than 50Gb) and lugging it around with you. The entry price might need to be a wee bit lower.
£5/month x 12 months = £60/year (unless the other £200 is “Apple tax” ;) )
Trouble with the “small form portable USB drive” (of which I have many by the way) is that while it's great to do an off-machine backup for a single machine, it's not much good for data recovery for a couple of boxes. For that you need some kind of off-site storage - and these days “cloud storage” seems to be where it's at.

In the meantime I could use your SFPUB to provide an offsite copy of a NAS box, and back my systems to the NAS. Although that's still a faff compared to being able to backup directly to offsite.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that while Google Drive is currently up against Dropbox et al, I wonder how long it takes for them to have a go at Mozy/Carbonite?