To note, a third-party company will be handling the content transfers and not Google itself, and it definitely isn’t free.
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Cloud storage has been pretty popular and convenient now a days, because you can upload your data anywhere and extract it whenever you want and only thing you need is internet connection.
Google is taking a different tack to its new service, partnering up with third-party service providers to handle the ingestion process.
The new service not only provides a faster way for customers to import backup data into the cloud but offers them the convenience of delivering that data in the media of their choice, whether hard-disk drives, tapes, USB flash drive or something else, according to Google. Google has also been challenging Amazon on price. It’s especially useful for businesses that might be “limited to a slow, unreliable, or expensive Internet connection”, he said. However, upload speeds generally top out at 1Mbps, with most plans providing just 768kbps (kilobits per second) for upload. For a company with a 10 Mbps DSL plan, for instance, upload speeds might actually be somewhere between 768 Kbps and 1 Mbps, according to Chong.
As for pricing, during the preview it charged $80 (£around £50, or AU$110) per disk regardless of the amount of data store on each one and both Google and Iron Mountain have failed to clarify how much will be charged for this new level of service. With Offline Media Import/Export, this process can now be completed in days instead of months. But if you’re a developer with terabytes upon terabytes of data, it could become a bit cumbersome.
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Google has announced Offline Media Import/Export today, which is a service that can be used by companies to send data stored on hardware to Google’s Cloud Storage service. Providers for Asia-Pacific and Europe, the Middle East and Africa are “coming soon”. Still, the addition of Google means that all three of the largest clouds now supports the mailing in of storage drives. As Google highlights on its Offline Media Import/Export product page, it’s taking a hands-off approach to onboarding service providers and is not liable for their actions.
