There is a bit of a price war with online data storage these days and Google just made the front of the pack. You can now get 1 TB of Google Drive cloud storage for only $9.99 a month. That is a whole lot of cloud storage for very little dough. If you are a dope and not backing up your home computer data (you know, all of those music files, family videos, pictures of the kids, etc.) then I guess stop reading this since it will not matter much to you : )
The timing of this could not have been more perfect for me. My home cloud backup provide recently told me to fire them to address a helpdesk ticket I opened up with them. Seriously, they didn’t even try to fix my problem – just told me to find another vendor. Unbelievable.
Although my setup is not the most elegant, it does work well and just took 10 minutes to get it in place. Now for the most part is it set it and forget it (of course after all of the data has uploaded to the cloud with in my case took weeks).
- Download and install the Google Drive app. Just login to your Google Drive account and there is a link for the desktop app on that page.
- Once the Google Drive app is installed, you are good to go. Not much to do beyond putting the files you are about in to the new Google Drive folder you have that lives under your My Documents. There is also a little icon down by your clock that gives you some status and option. Just click on that and you can see what is actively syncing and access your Google Drive folder among other options.
- For the backups, you can either just move all of your data under the Google Drive folder and be done with it or you will need to use some sort of backup/sync program to copy your data over to the Google Drive folder. I’m using FBackup since I have an external USB drive that holds all of my data. I setup a mirror backup job so that it checks my USB drive and mirror’s anything on that to my Google Drive folder.
- With your data now in the Google Drive cloud, you can now sync it to other machines, access it using any computer with internet access and your Google login, and even stream content like video’s and pictures. Since it is in the cloud you can even share the files/folders with anyone you want (they just need a google login). Bonus- the images and video will be searchable as well since the Google engine will scan them and tag anything it recognizes.
- What about security? Well that might be an issue if you really want your data secure. The data is secure from others (IE your data will not suddenly show up on Google searches and be accessible to anyone and everyone), but you still may need to worry about what Google or any Google partners may do with it. From what I’ve read the language for their security says that Google can pretty much do what they want with the data, but then again most companies have similar polices. Frankly, with all of the data that Google has to deal with why would they ever care about my family pictures and video so I’m not too worried about it.
If you need some cloud storage or are thinking about it, this would be the time to jump in and get some. If prices drop they will also drop if you are using the service. Oh, and if you are one of the dopes that read this article, please start doing some backups at home!
