Google GDrive - Online Backup. Never happen.
Tuesday, March 7th, 2006There’s been lots of rumours and reports over the last couple of days about a leaked presentation on the Google site which talks about an on-line backup service that replicates users entire hard drive.
Personally I’d love a service like that - I’ve about 80gb stored on my disk and on-line backup, for free, of the entire thing, would be fantastic! However there’s a number of logistical problems people seem to be forgetting:
Upload bandwidth : even the best broadband providers still have sluggish upload speeds, which would make mirroring a hard drive a mammoth initial task, and that not taking into account quotas. Okay … once that’s done an incremental sync or differential sync would be easier.
Google launched free analytics to all Adwords users a couple of months ago, in less than a week they pulled the sign-up as it was killing their network. Fair play, there able to offer 2.5+gb storage to all GMail users, but think about it - what percentage of users come anywhere close to that level? On the other hand, even the most basic PC users would have a few gigabytes stored on their hard drive. I don’t believe the Google network, huge as it is, has capability anywhere near required for this.
The cost of providing this service would be exorbitant. The average cost per gigabyte is below 1 euro now, and you can safely assume Google has that down to probably 50 or 60 cent. Add to that the huge computing power that would be needed to serve all these files - even with large storage arrays. Even if Google only launched the service in Ireland, and a paltry 10,000 people signed up and backup up an average of 15gb, that’s 150 terabytes, and while doable, I think highlights that to provide this service to the global Internet community would cripple any EXISTING network.
Actually though, I do recommend a NAS, DAS or even just RAID for any servers customers, your data and web site is just too important to trust to a single hard drive.