Google Storage

Time for another little tech-centric entry. For the past couple of months I have been uploading all my photos to my Google Docs account, and it has been glorious. For years perhaps I have played with the idea of backups and online storage: I have a ton of photos in the range of forty gigabytes and they must be cared for.

First, a little history. Photos have been and I'm sure, always will be, the most important thing we can backup. But how do you do it securely? I started with making CD backups, of course. This evolved into DVDs and eventually, external hard drives. But it took quite some time for me to get into the offsite backup solution, which involved me copying everything to a 500GB drive and leaving it in my drawer at work. It's pretty rudimentary but it's the very least you could do. If you make disc backups, great, but you have to make multiple copies, and you have to keep them offsite.



This has been all well and good, but I have a problem with incremental backups: I just don't do them. About every six months I remember to bring the drive home, copy things over then bring it back. Honestly, this process can take me a month to do; very sad indeed but what do you expect from a semi-lazy procrastinator? So online backup has become more feasible over the years, but I've just never really gotten into it. Either the cost has been too high (can you put a price on keeping your memories safe?) or it's just been too inconvenient.

My dad discovered a bad system with unfortunate results: you could download the client, upload specific folders and your photos were safe in the cloud. But, when it did come time to restore them, he discovered that the photos were converted and made smaller than the originals. Still usable but really in my mind, they destroyed the data. I think that service was free, for good reason.

Google had introduced their "Docs" system a while back and it has now evolved into something that I can use. They now allow uploads of pretty much all file types, and have opened the floodgates to selecting a large number of files to upload at once; it used to be a real pain in the ass to upload anything more than four files at a time, as the service was geared more towards creating documents and spreadsheets online. Now I can select about two hundred files (you can do more but it gets wonky) and let them rip.

Now, they give you a single gigabyte to begin, but that won't suffice. So for $20US a year, you get 80GB of storage space. That's more like it; it's actually ideal. The cost is negligible when you consider what you're storing on there, and the best part of all, it's Google. You know they aren't going anywhere and your data is safe. I'm sure it's backed up among a few different storage farms around the world. They won't be going out of business. They are rarely down.

I could go into more details on what you get, but it's easy enough to find that on your own. I've uploaded 40GB of files thus far, and I keep on trucking. This has been an opportunity to sort my files out, categorize and put them into a new folder structure (and best of all, multiple folders at the same time). But really, it's helped me with the incremental backup: if I take a bunch of photos, copy them to my computer, it's just a couple of extra clicks to put them online. I can now access them anywhere. That external drive as backup has become quite redundant.

File restoration is also an important part of any backup solution, which is why an external drive should always be used: it will only take you a few hours to copy over a few hundred gigabyte's worth of data. Downloading 40GB from a service like this could take some time. Thankfully, Google allows you to download whole groups of files at once. Select a folder or two, choose to export them and it downloads in a nice (big) ZIP file. It may take some time, but it's a slick interface from what I can see.

Perhaps a creepy aspect of it - touching on the Google staying around forever bit - is that these files could be there forever. It creeps me out knowing that, as long as I renew for a measly $20 a year, my files are up there. They will be up there the day I die. I can pass these on to future generations just as easily as providing my password and account information. Amazing, really.