“Last weekend, Google declared all-out war on its cloud-storage rivals and announced new pricing for its Drive service,” Josh Wolonick reports for Minyanville.
“On the low end of Google’s new offerings, users can access 100GB of storage space for just $1.99 per month, while the amount of free space has tripled to 15GB,” Wolonick reports. “By comparison, Dropbox charges $9.99 per month for for 100GB while Apple’s iCloud service costs $20 per year for 15GB and $100 per year for 15GB [sic] [recte $20/year for 10GB, $40/year for 20GB, $100/year for 50GB].”
“Because Google is now obviously winning in the price fight, it has real hopes of gaining a market share advantage in a field that has been very competitive: Last year, Apple’s iCloud held 27% of the market, followed by Dropbox at 17%, and Google Drive at 10%,” Wolonick reports. “Google’s cloud services are generally reliable — but not always. Yesterday, many people who use Google apps for work experienced a disruption to service of Google Chat, Hangout (video messaging), and Sheets (the spreadsheet app in Google Drive). The company is always very quick to address these issues, but they’ve happened before (just two months ago, a technical problem left users without Gmail and Google Talk for 15 minutes), and they’ll happen again. These small issues may not seem overly significant, but when thousands to millions of users are affected at once, an outage can easily become a big problem.”
Read more in the full article here.
If you are going to have a 3rd party store your critical data and it is the ONLY source for that storage, then you never know when something happens (like Google storage recently with earlier Mac OSs) which causes corruption or data loss.
Maintaining local and dispersed backups on 4 TB physical hard drives these days is incredibly cheap and easy, even for the non-technical user. This is absolutely essential, unless you just don’t care about your data.
The general Back Up Lecture:
Q: What is the #1 Rule of Computing?
A: Make A Backup!
Q: How many backups?
A: One that is local for easy access. Another that is distant, in case your place burned down. Cloud backup is an excellent distant backup option, as long as you can deal with the slow restore time required.
Q: Should I use destructive backups or incremental backups?
A: Always use incremental backups. If you’re months out from your original backup and have verified that you’re having no problems with critical files, you can gradually destroy old backups. But keep in mind that a backup of corrupt files is totally useless.
Q: How often should I back up?
A: As often as you change your files. I’d suggest at least once a day. Apple’s Time Machine backs up hourly.
Class dismissed.
My personal approach is incremental most of the time –but pristine, “carbon copy” just before any critical update, buying a new Mac, whatever. Or sometimes when I feel the Mac is just “working really well”.
Outside that I do a pristine backup say once every three months no matter what, but to a different backup drive.
For a cheap way to have multiple drives to rotate through, check out OWC’s Voyager, where you plug in dirt cheap, bare internal drives, and they mount as usual. I rotate between three 1TB $99 internal drives.
I agree with you SO much: BACK UP your stuff, people! Especially now that our lives are in graphics, movies, photos, emails, and other files — you can’t just WISH that stuff back after it’s been destroyed or lost.
ps. my personal favorite, longtime fabulous backup tool is SuperDuper. Rock solid.
You’re into the ART of backup. Nice. I own a bunch of OWC drives, my faves. I also prefer SuperDuper, but I’ve used CCC in a pinch.
Nobody trusts Google to do the right things, in any respect.
I’m not a Google fan, but those prices are awesome! I wish Apple would match the prices and come out with a dropbox type solution again!!
Why? drive storage is cheap at home, makes no sense are you hosting porn video’s?
Apple could improve iCloud in soooo many ways. The thoughtful integration with the OS is great! I take a lot of it for granted now. But there is soooo much more iCloud could be doing. Apple just doesn’t have the enthusiasm for running a full cloud service. They’ve proven that through all the years of DotMac and MobileMe. *sigh*
If Apple is going to encourage backing up your iOS device, it should exclude the space taken up by backups from being counted against your free iCloud allotment.
Either that or enlarge the free capacity to 20GB. Nickel & diming your customers to death is the old business model. The new business model is to offer lots of free online storage, one that Cook has not adapted to yet.
Again: BackBlaze costs $5 per month (or less if you buy two years worth) for unlimited space. The Mac software is excellent. No Java. The software includes scheduling. The service has end-to-end encryption. It is ‘Trust No One’ compliant.
I haven’t found anything better. Please folks, let me know if you have. I’ve looked at Arq and SpiderOak. I already use Box, DropBox and iCloud for less critical files.
Get a NAS Derek.
I’ve considered it! For now, I’m merely using connected portable drives with Time Machine for each of my Macs.
That’s a great deal. I will definitely consider this first if I need such a service.
How does it compare to CrashPlan?
Crash Plan has compatibility issues with many Mac apps. I’ve seen it many times where someone is using Crash Plan, their drive gets hosed, and then they try to restore critical app data and Crash Plan does not have it stored.
Crash Plan does not seem to save invisible files. Some apps use invisible files to store data, and OS X uses invisible files in many areas (.DS_STORE for example). So Crash Plan does not provide full backup support for OS X.
I don’t know. But I am told that CrashPlan works via Java, which I avoid via the Internet. Oracle ruined Java. I’ll end my Java rant there.
How about this Derek?
http://filetransporterstore.com
They look great for local backups. I also like the distant serving.
Huh. Apple charges for cloud memory the same way it changes for iPhone/iPad/Mac memory. A lot.
If I get desperate for space to archive on the cheap with goofball err google, I would do this.
Use disk utility to create a backup disk image with 256 encryption! Upload to Goofball Service. 😛
Meh. I’m pretty happy with using Dropbox for my documents folder, and I also use it to sync my desktop and downloads folder (which I manage with Hazel). This allows me to keep the basics of my system in sync across a few devices, plus I can also access these items on my phone. The free space (bumped up to 6GB with various promotions) is more than good enough for this.
I then have my old iMac running as a server of sorts, and split into 3 partitions, two of which I back up my current iMac and MacBook Air to. This combined drive is then physically backed up to rotating external drives and also backed up to Backblaze. On top of that I have a Time Capsule running for versioning of stuff and iCloud for what it does.
In terms of storage, if I include my iTunes library I need terabytes of space, so I’m happy with a NAS with RAID redundancy. My music is on iTunes plus and all my dvd’s are backed up to external drives kept in a firebox, so worst case I’d have to re-rip them all. Beyond that, in terms of day to day access to files I don’t need that much space, pdf’s and anything that is basically just text don’t take up a huge volume of space. I basically need under 10GB or terabytes, there’s no real middle ground.
I don’t see how iCloud and Google Drive can be seen to be competing merely on prince. iCloud ties transparently into the Apple ecosystem, so you’re getting more value than merely a remote place to store stuff.
——RM
Everything I would use to fill up a terabyte is already stored for free on Apple’s servers.