[linsomniac]

This article seems awfully doom and gloom. I find that:

- Google provides really good tools for archiving your data. If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it, archive it somewhere else, and then clean up items you no longer want. I recently did this with my photos, I knew I had some huge videos that had been uploaded that I didn't need (I had edited them into a Youtube video), so I was able to find and delete them and open up quite a bit of space. I toyed with the idea of deleting photos 5 years old, once I archived them, but I didn't need to because of the above.

- Google provides a lot of value to me for the $3/month I've been spending. Photo enrichment and searching is something I use all the time. Storage of my documents and files is very useful and google has been super reliable.

[crispinb]

I found it good value until they removed local syncing of Google Photos from their Gdrive client. That was where most of my data was. Making it only accessible via a web form download was a huge product downgrade that I don't think a more customer-responsive company would have risked. So I cancelled my subs & won't be going back (I'm sure they're quaking in their billionaire boots).

[techntoke]

This! Just look at the threads here:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/113672044

Google doesn't want you to be able to sync/backup your own photos anymore.

[crispinb]

It's particularly infuriating because it was such a poorly-motivated change. Customers supposedly found the interaction with Google Drive confusing, so rather than improve ergonomics, they cretinously remove a lynchpin feature altogether. I still haven't found a really good alternative.

[DevoidSimo]

I'm running a program which downloads any new photos to my computer. I'm away from my PC right now but I'm pretty sure it was this: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner

[crispinb]

Thanks - that's new to me. I'll check it out (though on the face of it I'm not entirely keen to start paying Google again for a service they treat this badly).

[beardbound]

I had the same feeling. I now use Dropbox in conjunction with iCloud photos, time machine and backblaze. I wasn’t a huge fan of the google drive client, but I loved insync (not affiliated, just a fan) since it worked on Mac/windows/Linux.

I tried out one drive before going to Dropbox and had huge issues withy the client on my Mac, my windows box, and just in general. The selective sync support was atrocious and kept getting into conflicts with the directories on the drive and refusing to sync then duplicating folders.

I also checked out iCloud Drive, but there’s no selective sync option and there’s some large directories I keep in cloud storage that I don’t need on my laptop.

[crispinb]

Agree on OneDrive - I was on Windows when I tried it, and found it a terrible mess of a service: at once highly invasive and yet lacking in capabilities. Dropbox is out of the question for me for political/ethical reasons. I've half-seriously considered writing something of my own, though the impulse wears off pretty fast when I start to think through the implications.

[giancarlostoro]

> If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it,

This is what I'm doing to migrate my data over to Microsoft's offering (I get adfree mail and 1TB + office products that work offline). I'm just waiting for Microsoft to let me use a domain without GoDaddy, so I can use the email, but I'm more likely to use it for storage.

[mywacaday]

Second that, I paid for extra storage as I want to save full resolution images. Currently getting 2TB for $99 a year that good lets me share with my family, is a no brainer and good value.

[semiotagonal]

I have the same and it's worth every penny.

Also, how are people hitting 15GB on just email? A little digital "KonMari" might be in order.

[linsomniac]

The 2TB tier seems to be the best value, matching the price of Backblaze B2 storage, which I consider to be one of the better deals.

[Alupis]

It's great. I have the 100GB level, mostly for pictures being backed up automatically at full resolution.

It is a bummer though, that their tiers go from Free (10GB), 100GB, 200GB, then up to 2TB. That's a huge jump!

Why not have a 500GB, and a 1TB tier?

They could probably get more people to pay them for storage if they offered a 50GB tier at $0.99 like Apple does for iCloud.

The 10GB free tier up to 100GB is a large jump too, and $1.99 a month might be just a little over the threshold for those that don't really use that much data but want phone backups and some pictures, etc.

[linsomniac]

This is especially curious coming from the company that does Google Fi, charging for data by the GB used, and crediting back portions of GBs unused, and also capping the monthly charge.

The 200GB/$3/mo to 2TB/$10/mo jump doesn't seem so bad to me. That's a dramatically lower per GB price ($0.015 -> $0.005). But then above 2TB it goes back up ($0.01), but worse is if you use 3TB, it's still $100/mo (that's over 3 cents a GB!)

I use backblaze for most of my bulk data storage (0.005/GB/mo).

[Alupis]

The nice part about the google storage is your Android phone can make automatic use of it. If you're just doing cloud storage from a computer or something, Backblaze can make sense.

[jfoster]

Exactly! Suppose you live for another 100 years. At the current rate, Google will be giving you the rest of your life with this for $300. You should just be hoping it remains this cheap.

[ZoomStop]

It's a charge per month at $2-$3. The lowest annual plan costs $19.95 USD.

My heartburn is Gmail was rolled out as near infinite storage. They told you archive, not delete. And for a while they had a ticker at the bottom showing your storage increasing over time. The cost is modest, but I feel Google isn't being true to the spirit of Gmail when they limit and charge for email storage.

[Danieru]

I remember that ticker, felt neat. When it disappeared I assumed it was a sign Google had enough textual data to mine. Similar with their handling of photos hence free down sampled storage.

Throwing my voice in I now pay. It is worth the price to keep high resolution photos of my kids with effortless sync from my wife's phone.

[jstummbillig]

Which it won't. Which is kind of the point the author is making (just instead of "free" in this case it's "3$")

While I do not feel that restricting Gmail and their other data collection tools to paying customers is in Google's long term plan, the potential of random price bumps on a highly integrated, wide ranging and very much closed product experience like the Gsuite certainly creates a problematic power dynamic.

[sliken]

My wife ran into the storage problem and got warning messages. Despite significant tinkering I couldn't find any way to get any kind of storage report. Once they split gdrive and gphotos there's no API, there's no report, and you can't sort by size.

I'm all for paying for a service, but it does seem rather underhanded to claim someone is using X GB of storage, but making it near impossible for them to see what is actually using that storage.

[gundmc]

In the account management portal there's a page called "Manage Storage" [1] that breaks down your storage usage by product.

Is that what you were looking for?

[1] https://drive.google.com/settings/storage?hl=en&utm_source=g...

[sliken]

So that shows the totals. My google photos is where most of my storage is. Turns out I have 10.22GB shown at that URL, but actually 134GB of photos. Some covered by the various promises made to pixel 1, pixel 2, and pixel 3 owners.

There's no way to show the largest photo/video, no way to tell which photo is covered by which storage promise, and no way to help manage that space.

So basically it's a trap.

I likely have some hour or two video that's a big chunk of my storage, but you can't sort by size or video length.

[gundmc]

Ah, that seems like a pretty big gap!

[sliken]

Indeed, I'm learning towards downloading the 134GB and doing it all myself. I'm learning towards digikam for organization (tagging, cropping, organizing, etc) and then using one of the upload methods to something like piwigo (self hosted or a service). That way I have control, can have it backed up, and won't have to endure the random changes google has been making.

The weirdest of which is that pixel 4 prices are higher than expected (even higher than Apple!) and they are dropping the free backup full quality photo backups.

[yread]

I dunno. It's really hard to find out an overview what are you actually using the storage for. I had google backup enabled and forgot about it - it's really not obvious to find the UI. Then I disabled it and deleted it - it was about 4GB and my used space went down by 400MB.

You also can't find out how much storage a folder on google drive is taking up. And don't even get me started on Photos.

[rishsharma]

Try using the Google Backup and Sync to download your contents. Then use your Finder/Explorer right click -> Get info options. I admit not ideal.

Also this may be helpful: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Better than Finder/Explorer would be something like QDirStat/WinDirStat to get a recursive size count, with graphical display.

https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat

[sliken]

That's nice for drive, but doesn't include any photos/video in photos.google.com.

So basically you have a single google storage pool that's reported at the bottom of the gmail.com interface. But now you can't use any of the google drive related tools to see what is consuming all your storage.

The photos.google.com is time based, so it's very hard to see what your largest files are.

[Alupis]

They have a page that gives you a full breakdown of how it's being used[1]

[1] https://one.google.com/

[yread]

Do you mean https://one.google.com/storage ? That gives just a general overview - photos are this much, drive this much.

How much space does this folder take? What is the largest video? How much space do old photos take? All trivial to answer on a local disk, impossible to do in Google's account.

[gorgoiler]

Hah. Takeout is neat, but it doesn’t seem to include any of the ad tracking data google have on me. Emails, videos, files: yes. URLs I’ve been tracked to that influence which ads I’m served: nope.

I recently found it easier to find an old music video I’d made by using takeout to download my YouTube archive, rather than figuring out which sub identity of which linked account I had used to upload the private video.

[knorker]

Presumably that's because that's not your data.

I mean nothing good or bad about that. But why would you expect to be able to download data that's not yours?