Whats the cheapest way to save those phone photos now that Google Photos is going to get paid
If you’re used to storing your photos and videos in Google’s cloud for free, this week brought some bad news: the days of unlimited storage are numbered.
As of June 2021, you’ll still get 15 gigabytes of free storage, but beyond that you’ll have to pay more. As the heady days of free data storage come to an end, what’s the most economical way to store photos or any file from your smartphone? Should you continue to upload your snapshots to the cloud or store them on a computer? Should you pay for a bigger hard drive on your device, or maybe think about an external hard drive?
Let’s start with smartphones. It is in memory that companies like Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. are really making their money. This will set you back $ 100 more for every 128GB of memory you add to your iPhone or Galaxy, the most recent iterations of which are both available with up to 512GB. That’s a lot more than the cost for the. Either manufacturer: A similar-sized NAND flash memory chip costs just $ 1.66 at recent prices. This is indeed a very healthy gross profit margin.
Google meanwhile only offers its Pixel phones with 128 GB of memory. It was great when the company allowed you to store unlimited data in the cloud for free. But now it is worth considering your options. How much will the cloud cost you? Major mainstream cloud providers – like Apple’s iCloud, Google One, Microsoft OneDrive, and Dropbox Inc. – are pretty much price-aligned these days. For 200 GB you can expect to pay $ 2.99 per month, for 2 terabytes it will be $ 9.99.
Americans replace their smartphones, on average, every 33 months, so purchasing an additional 200GB of storage each month would cost $ 98.97 over the life of the device. This is significantly cheaper than buying a smartphone with more memory to start with, as opting for an iPhone with 256 GB of additional memory would add $ 200 to the price. Of course, the more willing you are to keep your phone, the less advantageous it is over cloud storage.
How about giving up the extra phone storage space and just regularly backing up your handset to your computer? If you’re an Apple fan, backing up an iPhone to a Macbook won’t save you a dime – the additional memory options for the company’s laptops cost the same per gigabyte as they do for the iPhone. In some cases, they are even more expensive.
But you can start saving money with external hard drives and flash drives. A 256GB USB flash drive from SanDisk, a unit from Western Digital Corp., costs as little as $ 32.49. On a cost per gigabyte basis, this eliminates the rest of the fleet: smartphones and laptops cost the equivalent of 78 cents for each additional gigabyte; cloud providers charge 49 cents; and the external hard drive averaged just 15 cents (1).
The problem is that external hard drives are very painful to use. You usually have to download files to your computer and from there to the player. You will then not be able to access it until you return to your computer.
There are however two options which are better. Some smartphone manufacturers, notably Samsung, allow you to add additional memory in the form of a MicroSD card. At an average of 19 cents per gigabyte, they are only a little more expensive than an external drive and much easier to use.
The other option is unlimited free online photo storage: Amazon.com Inc. But there is a risk that the e-commerce giant will follow Google’s lead. It’s the kind of bait-and-change tactic that antitrust authorities are starting to take a closer look at, where tech giants appear to be rendering a free service long enough to oust smaller rivals and take their clients, and then increase their prices. once in the field. Sometimes cheaper is not necessarily in the customer’s long-term interest.
