I finished going through my Van Morrison files today on the Amazon Drive so now it is just Bob Dylan I have to sort through. There is a lot of Bob on the Drive so it will take me a week or so to get through it and then I’l cancel my subscription. Hopefully, I’ll get a little refund which I can put to better use.

I’ve pretty much decided to go ahead and use Google Drive and drop File Factory. I’d still appreciate any comments on my post about making that decision. I’ll probably start tomorrow uploading shows to it and I figure I’ll do a daily post where I link over to the Drive showing you what’s new.

That may change a bit over time. I still love my artist’s pages and I like the idea of keeping them updated. Maybe I’ll just add dates to those posts with a link to the appropriate section of Google Drive. I’ll eventually go back and change the links in my old posts, too. I’ll drop the Amazon links and add in Google. But those are big projects and I’m in no hurry.

I still plan to write movie reviews and talk about pop culture and tell stories. The links to Google with music files will just be on part of the blog from now on.

Thanks for staying with me on this weird little journey.

I’m a strange, silly man. I tell myself that I won’t be uploading anything or sharing anything until I have all my files sorted and organized. Then I spend far too many hours searching for the perfect cloud storage system so that when I am ready to start sharing shows again I’ll be able to. I land on Google Drive, it seems to have most of what I need and should work well for you all. But it gets pretty expensive once you get over 5TBs. I tell myself that my new plan is to not share shows every day. That I’m going to share fun things like entire tours or a cool run of shows, etc, and I’ll only do that once a week, or maybe 2-3 times a month. That will limit my storage needs so Google should still be ok.

Then I think that I also really want to have an online storage system for all my files. I like the idea of a cloud backup. But again that is really expensive. Except for File Factory. File Factory is cheap and has lots of storage. But File Factory isn’t all that great for non-pro downloaders

So I’ll use Google Drive for my sharing and File Factory for my backup. It’s the perfect plan I think. I start uploading a little to File Factory. Hey, I say to myself, why not share these shows on File Factory. Maybe they aren’t great for everyone to download, but I bet some folks will like them. So I do that. Then I decide to share stuff on File Factory every week. And I upload even more.

Here’s the question. If I’m uploading everything to File Factory and sharing those links should I still use Google Drive? Or, since File Factory doesn’t work all that well for non-pro accounts, should I just switch everything to Google Drive.

Google is much more expensive than File Factory. I could keep those costs down if I just use Google for my “official” shares. I’d still probably beg for money, but probably less frequently. If I just use Google then I’ll be uploading shows every night and that will add up fairly quickly. On average I’d say I’ll upload one TB every six months.

The price breakdown for Google is this:

2TB: $99/year
5TB: $249/year
10TB: $44.99/month ($599.88/year)
20TB: $99.99/month ($1,199.88/year)
30TB: $149.99/month ($1,799.88/year)

That’s all the plans they have (well, technically they have a 100gig and a 200 gig plan but I’d burn through that super fast). For some reason they don’t have in between plans, but jump up by 5 & 10 TBs. Once you get past 5TBs they only bill monthly as well.

I currently have enough money in my Paypal account to buy a 2TB plan. That wold last me probably about 1 year at which point I’d have to renew anyway, and I’m guessing I’d need to bump it to the 5TB plan. Then in another 1 1/2 years or so I’d need to bump it to the 10 TB and renew that for a few years until I’d have to bump it to 20TB. Probably. I currently have just under 10TBs worth of shows, but presumably in a few years I’ll have more than that.

That’s a lot of money. When I decided to use File Factory as my backup storage plan it was mainly because I didn’t want to beg for that much money from you all. I hate begging in the first place, and that seems like an excessive amount. Especially since my whole plan for the blog has changed and I won’t be doing daily posts for individual shows. I also worry that at some point you guys will get tired of giving and then I will, once again, lose all the shows I’ve uploaded to a cloud storage.

But screw it, I’m asking anyway. You all have been very generous in the past and I thank you for it. If you want to help pay for Google Drive in the future please let me know. At this point I still don’t plan on doing posts for individual shows. I’ll probably do a daily post where I just link to what I’ve uploaded to Google Drive that night. Unlike File Factory you will be able to read the text files inside of Google Drive and make better decisions on what you want to download. But you won’t be seeing that info in a post on my blog.

Or if you’d rather opt out let me know that info too. Or if you are happy with File Factory. It really doesn’t matter that much to me but I know some of you all hate File Factory and Google Drive will definitely be easier all around. But I’d like to hear some feedback.