For full context, that is an account I manage for a small business. I have their NAS sync/archive to Google Drive which allows them to easily send files to clients, recover things remotely, etc. They have about a dozen accounts in G Suite, so they are paying roughly $120/mo.
I have an account that I split with some friends for personal business/storage use. In that case, I just have the 5 users. I’m not sure how much we’re all using, as the bulk of the storage isn’t all in one account, but I’d guess it’s in the teens of TB.
I think this really hits on the underlying mechanics of this arrangement. For instance, the company where I am actually employed also has G Suite Business (possibly even enterprise, I’m not sure), and they have 500+ employees, many of whom are using barely any storage at all. So the profit margins there are huge, and afford @Ruffalo, myself and small businesses like my client, the ability to leverage large amounts of storage for a bargain.
Yes, absolutely. Most people don’t use more than a couple gigabytes for their pictures and home videos of their cat, and Google has tons of spare capacity. That said, they’re sure as hell losing money on both of us! $120/month doesn’t pay for 67TB of cloud storage! Even assuming they get a huge discount, Google probably pays $15/TB for the disks and they are highly redundant both per region and worldwide.
Not that this would make enough difference to make your or I profitable for Google, but I’ve always been curious to what degree, if any, they’re able to leverage dedup.
That’s definitely another part of it, sure. All my data is encrypted so they can’t dedup it.
I expect most user-generated content (e.g. cat videos) can’t be deduped, but the vast majority of their true volume is pirated media which could be, when not encrypted.
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