Google slashes the price of Google Drive storage to as low as $9.99 for 1TB

Any router with a USB port can be used to power it & to connect an external HD, etc. to be used as a cloud stores with up to 3T for "Free" (well with-out paying like forever) lol

This all nice, but the average home user doesn't have the bandwidth to take advantage of that much storage with typical broadband connections. Most broadband connections are limited to under 20 Mb/sec uploads even with a good plan, so it can take weeks or months to use that. And while it's good to recover an occasional file or two that's lost, trying to download a backup of an entire drive that's died is impossible, both in terms of time and with the typical download caps most ISPs have.

Also, there's the question of "lock-in". Sure this storage is cheap, but if you spend months or even a year slowly uploading all your content, you're very reluctant to switch to another provider. Instead, you'll stay with the one you have for years as long as they are viable. These cloud storage services know this, which is why they offer very attractive starter rates.

Personally I find it hard to justify paying for google drive or other such services when portable hard drives are so insanely cheap and mobile data is so insanely expensive...but if I did need to work by cloud with no physical presence anywhere, I would just work by FTP; there are tons of services offering unlimited FTP storage plus (S)HTTP and a free web address for under $100 a year...I happen to have one just because I need a server and I am away from home too much to worry about needing to reset the FiOS box after a brown-out. In addition to the website, I use the FTP side like a personal dropbox, there's about 1.5TB up there right now and only about 20MB is for the actual website.

Hoping Dropbox follows suit.

As for the home or portable drive solutions, what happens in the event of disaster? You have to have a pretty good backup plan. At least with the cloud services, your info is there. In fact, I used a promo from Box.net for 50gb and use that to backup my photos from my phone, that way if there is a hardware or software failure, even a house fire, my files are safely stored for retrieval.

Sorry. Duplicate comment.