So, at a friend’s prompting (and that it struck me as a bargain) I paid $20 over to “Google paid storage” to give me 80GB storage for one year. This may be cheaper than Amazon S3 storage where the cost calculation is more complicated (see below ¹) and is significantly cheaper than dropbox which charges $9.99 per month for 50GB. However, if you read further you’ll see that this price is too good to be true.

What I paid for was essentially this, an extension of the normal storage space that Google provides for free for gmail, gdocs, picasa and so forth: “Google offers a way to purchase more storage space when you run out of free storage space in Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Blogger (for photos), and Google Buzz (for photos).”

So, in my google docs account I can now see that I’ve got 80GB available, but interestingly, if I want to access real “Google Storage” (ie. using an Amazon-S3-like API) it is something else, called Google storage for developers. Unfortunately, Google have named their products in a way that has confused me and is possibly confusing for others with these similar names.

Sadly, “Google Storage for Developers”, hereafter called by me “Real Google Storage”, is also only currently available to a limited number of U.S. developers only.

It kind of sucks that I can’t (currently) assign some of my 80GB over to Real Google Storage, although I assume Google will make some sort of plan for this in future.

In the mean time, I must make use of google docs, but it has some limitations. The way I see it, there are two big hurdles with google docs: firstly, the need to chunk files into 1GiB or less, and secondly for non-premier accounts (even if you paid for google storage) access is only through a web interface.

With respect to the first problem, I’ve written a script that encrypts/decrypts and then chunks files for storage in google docs, this is described in another blog post of mine here. With these scripts one is able to securely store your own private files on google docs and not worry about others reading the contents; also files greater than the 1GiB limit are split into multiple parts.

Secondly, with respect to access being through the web front-end, I investigated alternative ways of accessing my gdocs, for example as one would have to do from a server without a graphical web browser (for my primary use case I have a strictly command line only server overseas that I’d like to back up to my google storage).

There are two FUSE filesystem mounters for Linux (that I know of) which allow one to attach your google docs as a regular filesystem, there is a python one – google-docs-fs and a java one – gdocsfs. They work as advertised, except both do not appear to have support for content of an arbitrary file type, as the google-docs_fs manual states: “Google-docs-fs does not support the new feature of Google Docs which allows any file type to be stored. I am looking to add this in future releases.” The ability to upload files of any type is one of my primary needs with online files storage, I’d like to be able to store my server backups and files for my own personal transfer on google docs, and not just spreadsheet and document type files.

Well, since I’m a programmer I thought I’d write a simple utility to upload arbitrary files, and I discovered gdocs4ruby, but alas this seemed to only support an older version ² of the API that google provides for google docs.

Luckily, and unsurprisingly, python has official support for the gdocs V3 API. So, I quickly wrote a python script using the linked-to guide, and also quickly found out that I could not simply upload an arbitray file.

I obviously didn’t read version 3 of the google docs API closely enough as it quite clearly states that upload of files with an arbitrary content-type is only for Google Apps Premier domains.

I’m not the only one that has a problem with this: there is a forum thread here with many other frustrated folk who have paid for google storage and would like to use an API call to upload files of arbitrary types. On the one hand, perhaps I shouldn’t expect something for the price I paid, and I can understand the google do not want to turn google docs into another Rapidshare filled with copyrighted materials. On the other hand, Google’s vagueness about what one is buying at the time of buying it without spelling out the limitations, and not providing a contactable link or address for obtaining a refund for what they’ve sold you is also unfair.

So, I probably won’t end up using my google storage for much and can’t really recommend it to others who want to use it for the same things that I do, rather look at Dropbox or even Ubuntu One. Being forced to upload files through a web browser that supports javascript means I probably won’t be able to use it for uploading my server backup files to google docs as my overseas server is strictly command-line only. And uploading files from home using the web frontend for google docs is still painful and flaky – the web frontend consistently gives me “server error” messages when I attempt to upload my files just like others have experienced.

¹ Regarding S3 pricing, it is composed of both an in/out traffic charge and a storage charge; based on the examples given on the page, assume in a given year that I store 50GB in my account for the whole year, and that I transfer in 200GB and out 200GB during that year, then the charge for this will come to:
$0.150 per GB (US standard, not California)! * 50GB = $7.50 per month
16.667GB transfer-in per month * $0.10 per GB = $1.66 per month
16.667GB transfer-out per month * $0.15 per GB = $2.50 per month
So, approximately $11.66 per month which works out to be lot more than the $20 that google currently charge for so-called “storage” of 80GB for one year.

² I may be wrong about gdocs4ruby supporting only an older API for google docs as I didn’t tarry too long in Rubyland once I saw that I could not upload files of arbitrary type.