UKC

I think Google are screwing me over here, and I'm just wondering if I'm missing something obvious and wondering how others deal with this.

My phone automatically backs up to the cloud in Google Photos. Videos and Photos.

My phone has something like 256GB of storage, but Google Photos only has 15GB.

So naturally I keep hitting the limit on Google Photos.

Using the Google Photos manage storage feature I've deleted all the blurry photos and rubbish videos. This is fine for a while, but then it's soon full again.

I would quite happily just leave it full and not back up anything current, but then my email stops working. This I find really frustrating. When your email stops working, any email you are sent is deleted forever. I can't work this way and it means I can't use GMail for anything important. Email shouldn't be held to ransom, and even if it's held to soft random, they shouldn't be permanently deleting emails you haven't seen. Crap service here and I want to avoid using them out of principle.

So another option is to delete all the videos from Google Photos, but then they are automatically deleted from my phone. There doesn't seem to be a way to separate it. I guess I could save everything on a computer, wipe Google Photos (and by extension, my phone) and turn back up off, and copy it all across, but what a faff.

Also, I've read that when people disable backup, it randomly comes back on again.

It seems to be cleverly designed to screw you over to make you buy the cloud storage as there's no easy alternative.

How are other people managing (I don't care about Apple solutions, I have bigger reasons to want to avoid them).

"Email shouldn't be held to ransom, and even if it's held to soft random, they shouldn't be permanently deleting emails you haven't seen. Crap service here and I want to avoid using them out of principle."

Sounds like you were happy to use the services because they are free, and now that you've reached the limits set on those free services, they are "crap".  They are free up to a point for a reason.  You can pay for increased storage, and you won't have your email issue (until you reach that limit).  

Of all those emails you probably get, do you delete the ones you really don't need to hang onto?  People use their email as a file storage system (easily done - I'm guilty of that).   How many years of pointlessly kept emails, some with sizeable attachments, are taking up space?

you don't get owt  for nowt.

You signed up to the T&C - but are moaning when you've reached the end of their generous free allowance.

"So another option is to delete all the videos from Google Photos, but then they are automatically deleted from my phone" -- that an operator error, check what your settings are.  I can delete Google Photos and they stay on my phone.

I've been using Proton for a number of years; I pay for the Unlimited package but, as EdS rightly points out, "you don't get owt for nowt". It ain't free but it does keep my stuff secure (or, at least, that's what it claims to do ) 

Originally, I only wanted a half decent VPN across multiple devices, but Proton gives me much more for my money; mail, drive (storage), password vault, calendar, and wallet - ALL* encrypted. I'm fortunate to be an early adopter so my storage allowance increases yearly if I maintain my subscription, but €120.00 gets you 500GB and I believe that you can pay for additional space.

* With the obvious caveat of mail to non-encrypting recipients

As you said, the google wants you to buy extra cloud storage. Its called customer engagement. Or lock-in. Or hostage taking, depending on how you relate to 21st century late capitalism.

Google One subscription. 2TB for £8/month. But giving money to google just makes the world a worse place.

Or you can use Google Takeout to download your photos, stash the zip somewhere safe (not on your google drive obvs) and delete them all from your photos (and recycle bin - hint: use the web interface). Be aware that the zip download isn't exactly well organised, and it takes a little while  for the free space to show up.

Or move your email to Fastmail for ~£10/month for proper grown-up email hosting.

I can assure you, Google are not providing 15GB of free data because they are "generous". They want the advertising revenue, to collect data, to incorporate me into their ecosystem and build up a larger user base.

They are getting something from me, and I'm not happy with what I am getting in return. Fortunately my more important emails are with GMX who apart from having a terrible search function provide a great free email account.

The only reason I get Gmail emails at all is mainly because I use Google Wallet a lot. I bought a train ticket using Trainline whilst standing on the platform, and never got the email, which basically meant my train ride was without a ticket. Made the return complicated as I had no evidence.

I assume Google like all the revenue I give them from Google Wallet transactions, alternatives are available so it should be in their interest to provide a better user experience.

I also have a habit of doing the easy sign-in with Google which I won't be doing from now on. I'll have to work on transferring those services to my GMX account. 

Only way I know to do this is to turn “Back up & sync” off, but if it turns itself back on, say after a system update, those photos will be deleted from your phone. I don't know a way around this.

This may end up being the way I go. Just need to look into a home server.

Absolutely not, if I don't like the way their policies are designed to trick and trap on the free version, I won't pay money to them to solve the problem. I'd go to a competitor first.

I just avoid cloud storage and copy photos from my phone to my computer, and make a backup copy on an external hard drive on a semi-regular basis (which should probably be more regular if I'm honest). When my phone gets too full, I delete the oldest photos from it.

Then be aware that the photos in the zip download will be missing their embedded exif metatdata (eg gps location, date/time, etc)

Nearly everyone takes far too many photos that they never look at and are virtually the same as other photos they've taken.

It's one of the double edged consequences of these wonderful little computers we wander around with. Being able to go click, click, click with no extra cost means you're more likely to get that great shot, but few amongst us (includes me of course) rigourously delete the others.

The other rubbish accumulator is photos and videos via WhatsApp (and other similar apps), few will be personal "memories" that need to be kept, most seem to be humourous rubbish.

Really needs a good trainable AI bot to be able to correctly identify and delete all the rubbish.

I'm thinking similar lines.

Although I don't own a private computer. My wife and I only have work laptops which is a bit limiting.

So I'm thinking QNAP TS-233 Network Access Storage or similar. If I'm reading it correctly, you can access information on it remotely, and get your phone to automatically back up to it, without any ongoing charges.

These things when new can be hard to research as they so often keep the charges quiet until you've committed. But from what I've read it's all P2P so no service to pay for. I would still need to figure out the backup side of things. It's all well and good having two HDDs but if the house burns down that's not going to help much.

FTFY

How do you feel about giving money to Microsoft?

You get 1TB cloud storage with a single user Office subscription for £60 a year or 6TB with a family subscription at £80/year. Discounts can be found.

I always download my phone photos and videos to a hard drive plus backup drive, just as I do for SLRs and other cameras.

Google are desperate for my Pixel 7a to be backing up to their cloud. I keep batting back their offers as I don't need it.

Problem solved, no dramas.

MS have pissed me off since they moved to a subscription model - I just need something that works, I don't need loads of extra useless features and updates.

Even though I take thousands of photographs every year (every month ?), the words ‘photos’ and ‘manage’ can’t be used in the same sentence to describe my total mess of a filing/back up system. Good luck sorting your issue though. 

Google Photos does prompt me to enable backups to Google Drive from time to time - which I decline - but it's never done it without my knowledge. (Currently a Pixel 7 user, and religious about installing Android updates as they come out.)

One off the first things I do when I set up a new Android phone is to turn off automatic backups. I much prefer to take responsibility for backing up my data using mechanisms which I have set up and secured myself, and over which I have complete control.

MS have had form in this regard well before they moved to the subscription model. I can't remember the exact figures but ISTR that there's long been a sort of Pareto principle involved with MS Office apps, in that 80% of users actually use no more than 20% of the available functionality.

That's interesting. I'm a big fan of freeware, have at times in the past run various flavours of Linux as my main home operating system, and used Libra Office, OpenOffice, etc. to avoid flaky MS software.

But these days I find that Windows and Office365 just works, so I haven't bothered with the alternatives for a while.

I'm sure the same can be applied to most complex productivity software.

How many people routinely go beyond adjusting exposure and contrast, cropping, and other basic functions of photo editing tools?

Sounds odd.  I have Google photos on my phone.  I have never turned the back up on. I have to keep getting rid of the message asking me if I want to make the most use of my free 15GB storage.  I still get use of my gmail account which I thought was free anyway and not linked to cloud storage... my gmail address predates all of that.  I've never signed up for anything.  Is it something thats happening within your phone?  After all turning off back up is just a choice.  

Which is precisely the reason for a subscription model. With the buy once no one bothered upgrading unless an amazing new feature came out or it got so old that it was no longer compatible with the OS. Hence less profit.

That's exactly the point. You haven't turned the back-up on, so you haven't filled up your free cloud storage allowance, so your email has no problems. 

The lowest tier of storage upgrade is well under 2 quid a month, and should be plenty of storage for someone who's been scraping by on 15GB until now.

Some cynicism is justified, it's certainly partly about that. But it's also fair to say that most non-trivial software products have to run just to stand still these days. So it genuinely does take a team of people constantly working on it just to squash bugs/vulnerabilities and keep it compatible with all the other software it interacts with that's also constantly changing. Which clearly isn't a good fit with a buy-once-use-forever payment model. Now clearly Microsoft would do just fine either way, and are making money hand over fist from subscriptions that dwarf the amount they pay the teams that maintain it, but some smaller companies have genuine problems surviving on non-subscription payment models in a world where they have to keep spending money just to keep the software working. If your sales fluctuate, that's a huge problem.

Not sure how that can be.  Firstly gmail predates google photos by a long way - and its free.  The free cloud allowance is just something built in... there isn't a requirement to have any more and I can't think of why it would be, that if you did utilise the free allocation they give you, they would then take away the use of gmail until you paid them to add more storage.  It doesn't make sense, so surely that can't be the reason the gmail stops working, if the OP then turns off back up.

See 

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6374270?hl=en-GB

Thanks, my curiosity got the better of me and I looked further just before seeing your post.  So my gmail shares google's free 15gb of cloud data. (not that I use the gmail account much either).  

To Luke90... you can ignore my last post which makes me sound like an old duffer.

Turn off photos backup.

If you like some photos that much, download them to computer and keep a backup there and periodically back everything up to the external hard drive you keep in your bank secure storage box.

I suspect that people who find it gets "turned back on" actually accidentally turn it on themselves because google phones keep offering to turn it on (probably because they want your photos for AI training or something, who knows) and you have to keep telling that prompt to bugger off. Irritating, but that's the world we live in.

Also, not sure if someone mentioned this already but you also won't _receive_ new e-mails to your gmail, so you could miss a lot of important emails if that is your main/only account.

Mine's maxed out and causing problems. I'm not organised with email and my google drive is a dumping ground for all sorts so no surprise it's full except I deleted a few GB of crap recently yet Google took less than a week rummaging through my phone and computer to fill the account up with again.

My email client crashes if I try to delete more than a few hundred emails at a time which is painful when there's 65,000 of them to manage!

Definitely feels hard to keep on top of and designed to be easier to stump up a few quid a month for the extra storage.

jk

I was having a little think, and what would solve the problem for me overnight is if I had the option to only back up photos, and not videos.

I still want my photos to be backed up. I don't take many on my phone, it's the videos that are the problem. Mostly videos of kids, which I don't want to delete, but they don't need to be backed up to the cloud, but I'd like them to be more backed up than just on my phone (which eventually will break or be lost).

Amazon prime comes with free unlimited photo storage you just download the amazon photos app to your phone and it automatically backs up. Obvs you have to pay the annual fee but you get the next day delivery and amazon TV (which I barely watch). I actually pay for Google storage as well because it's got my old old photos on but I think I only pay £25 a year for 200Gb which I thought was alright, and my wife uses it as well. If I live for another 50-70 years I should probably work out the most effective option for the rest of my life really.

I pay £75 a year to iCloud for 5TB of storage which is enough for the two computers and two phones in the household.

Their phone app has an option to disable backup of videos.

I know that the desktop app preserves the metadata of photos; I can't say I've ever checked whether the phone app does (that said, my phone snapshots aren't important enough to need it anyway).

Can you point me to the 5tb plan? I’m on the 2tb one and can’t see anything that matches what you’ve quoted.

thanks

I'm confused about how Google manages photos and their backups but, on the above, the default setting seems to be that WhatsApp photos are not backed up. So while they might clogging your phone up, I don't think they affect your photo storage on Google.

I can't see where exactly the option to disable the backups of WhatsApp photos has been set, though.

In case it helps anyone...

1. Click your account photo in the top right corner of the main window
2. Select 'Photos settings'
3. Select 'Backup'
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select 'Back up device folders'
5. Toggle each folder on or off depending on whether you want them backed up

If I recall correctly, they aren't backed up by default but the app might prompt during setup to suggest it, and perhaps periodically afterwards.

They only seem to be offering 5TB plans these days on their pricing page (not including the free 10GB one, and, or the $2.95 100GB one): https://www.idrive.com/pricing

I was on the 2TB plan for several years but that seems not to be available any more.  They upgraded me to the 5TB plan at my last renewal.  From what I can see on their web site, that plan is normally $69.50 for the first year (not sure where that £75 figure came from), then $99.50 after that.  However, they currently have a special offer of $9.95 for the first year, right there on their home page: https://www.idrive.com/

Doesn’t look like an Apple product to me. You did mention iCloud.

Apologies, I was typing that on the bus.  Either a typo on my part or bl**dy autocorrect.

Not a problem, someone may find it useful.

Up to you, but you don't necessarily need a home server. I have used USB disks for ages for general PC backups, photos and videos, which have the advantage that you can accumulate lots of them and store them in different locations etc. Phone photos etc go directly there and not to google. I use Gmail and siphon all my email including work through it as historically the spam system has been very good - still is but the others have caught up somewhat. With no visual media and the occasional delete of large email downloads etc, the 15Gb is plenty.

Never had to bother with the NAS drive.

The ticket will be in the Trainline app.

I can't think of any direct competitor (in the mass market cloud file syncing category) that doesn't use the same business model of free tier with limits to encourage you to upgrade. It's an incredibly common business model. If you're going to have a huff and refuse to work with any company that offers it, you're going to cut down your options an awful lot.

Unfortunately not. I checked out as a guest.