I Joined Google One and I Bet You Will, Too
There’s never enough cloud storage
I fought and fought. In truth, I deleted and deleted in a futile attempt to maintain enough free Google Cloud Storage space to continue receiving Gmail.
They were a continued source of stress, the messages informing me that I’d eaten up 97% of my Gmail storage space, and I’d been seeing them for at least a year. And it wasn't just my Gmail. I have a G-Drive account and store all of my photos and mobile-captured videos (720p to 1080p) in Google Photos.
That service, where I don’t even store the original resolution of all my images (I do High-Quality, which is a slightly compressed, and more efficient version), is an important resource for me. I use it to effortlessly search across two decades worth of digital photos (and a growing number of scanned images shot before the turn of the century).
Google’s storage limits, especially in email, were something I didn’t have to think about until fairly recently.
Gmail started with a free gigabyte of storage in 2004. Google supported the free service with contextual ads generated by “reading” the contents of your emails (really just an automated system that matched keywords with ad content). At the time, a gig of storage for email seemed like a lot, but it soon wasn’t and…
