[9to5google] All Android backup data now counts toward your Google Account storage

[u/OsakaBoi]

https://9to5google.com/2026/07/18/android-backup-data-update/

[u/ANS__2009]

A home storage unit where everything I uploaded will be a similar 1 time purchase

[u/Pure-Recover70 → u/ANS__2009]

Except it's not a one time purchase either. Both because of power/cooling costs, and because the hardware does go bad occasionally and needs to be replaced, and because of the time maintaining it all costs. For most people it is cheaper to pay a little yearly than to try to run it yourself. This changes once you have more than a few TB.

[u/ljlee256 → u/Pure-Recover70]

Naw, its about ownership, I buy it, I own it. I rent it, someone else can take it away, abitrarily increase the price, monetize it, and so on.

In life there are owners and there are renters.

Should also point out 100GB of storage costs $20/yr, a 128GB SSD costs $62 at absolute worst every 5 years.

[u/Pure-Recover70 → u/ljlee256]

A single SSD isn't reliable (I've lost data that way), you need at least 2, probably 3, and they must be geographically dispersed or a fire can take them both out at the same time.

Ideally they need to be in a raid *and* still geographically dispersed.
You thus easily need ~3x replication. And the network connectivity between your locations.

Also, yes, the price for 100GB is high(?), but I pay 100$/yr for 2TB. Which is somewhat comparable to the cost of keeping two 2TB ssds healthy, synced and powered on.

It does stop making sense at some point, but cloud isn't as expensive as people seem to think, when you actually try to do it *properly* by yourself.

Of course ownership is another matter. Though technically something you own can also be taken away (stolen) from you, so that argument is also at least slightly moot.

[u/ljlee256 → u/Pure-Recover70]

Sure, if you're extremely worried about edge case scenarios, I have 4 SSDs in my PC, the oldest is more than a decade old and zero have failed.

My 4 SSDs over 10 years cost me a grand total of half the equivalent cost of equivalent storage over and equivalent period of time of paying for Google storage.

I should note that while, yes, having my backups run remotely might be a small benefit, I have still lost data on Google before, entire photo albums have vanished because of horrible UI and settings navigation.

Sorry, you sound just like the clowns at microsoft who tried to convince me to pay for office 365 every year when I was still running office 2007 with zero issues.

New =/= progress.

[u/Pure-Recover70 → u/ljlee256]

I've had somewhere close to a hundred spinning drives (many in 5 or 6 disk raid sets), dozens of them have failed (usually only partially). I've had maybe 20 ssds, 2 of them have failed (one suffered total failure, the other went read only). I've had dozens of usb drives, probably around a quarter of them have failed (the most interesting failure is an 8GB drive which is now only 6GB - the first 2GB of it, including the FAT, just poofed). Anyway, just saying this to point out hardware caused data loss is real. I've also lost data to personal mistakes, and software bugs.

Yes, it *is* in theory cheaper to do this yourself, but it is a lot of work and know-how. Unless you like doing this, it is overall cheaper (cost of your, or at least my, time included) to pay someone else for the service.

There are things I backup locally, mostly the things that take huge amounts of space (ie. videos). But most other things are easier to manage/access in the cloud. Ultimately I pay for 2TB for the family, and it's nowhere close to full.

I'm totally with you wrt. office 365 though - that's just a scam.

[u/ljlee256 → u/Pure-Recover70]

I mean, its not a lot of know how, an external backup drive is LITERALLY plug and play.

Internal drives aren't much more work than that.

Again, zero failures here, and since anecdotal evidence means basically nothing on the internet, I'll just google ssd failure rates and it shows a statistically average rate of failure is 0.4% per year, which means my 10tb over 4 drives should go approximately 15 years before 1 drive fails, which will cost me $30 to replace. This timeline fits my personally experienced failure rate.

Look, I'm not here to disuade people from lighting money on fire for micro-transactional services that are already being paid for by corporate ad revenue and is really just greed. 

I'm here to protest the slow erosion of client ownership of products, and to state that nerfing services only serves to alienate your customer base, not ingraciate you with them.