Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The key steps to solving this problem are:
- Consolidate your archive data from local storage (like external USB or NAS drives) into a central location.
- Utilize your existing Google Workspace storage pool, which is typically a massive, shared data cap across all users.
- Upload the archive data directly to a Google Drive Shared Drive for easy access and retrieval.
- Reserve dedicated Google Cloud Platform storage for use cases where data needs to be served programmatically to an app or website.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For creative agencies, architecture firms, video production houses, and photography businesses, dealing with massive volumes of historical data is a constant challenge. When 10 terabytes of old project files are sitting on local external drives, the immediate need is to free up space without losing the data. The decision often boils down to: should you use your existing Google Workspace storage (like a Shared Drive) or delve into a more complex platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? For the vast majority of small businesses, the answer is simple, accessible, and right under their noses: Google Drive.
Leveraging Your Existing Google Drive Storage Pool
If you have a large company using Google Workspace, you already have access to a massive shared storage capacity. All of the licenses in your account contribute to a single, aggregated storage pool, often totaling hundreds of terabytes. This pool is more than capable of handling large archival data sets, such as a 10-terabyte external drive, and Google’s performance will not slow down, even with 47 terabytes or more stored. Using your existing Google Drive Shared Drive is the most practical solution because it’s already integrated with your daily tools, making files easy to store and instantly retrieve.
Why Google Drive is Superior for Archival Data
In the “old days,” businesses used Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) or Network-Attached Storage (NAS) arrays for redundancy. Today, Google Drive provides that redundancy and protection within the cloud. For simply storing and retrieving files, even old video recordings or large design plans, Google Drive is just fine.
- Ease of Access: Archived data is immediately accessible via the browser or the Drive desktop app, making it easy to search and view, even for very old files.
- Simple Migration: For most businesses with modern internet connections (like fiber optic with 500-800 megabits per second or 1 gigabit connections), you can migrate 10 terabytes of data by simply dragging and dropping. While it may take a couple of days, it’s a straightforward process that avoids complex cloud migration projects.
- Cost Efficiency: You are using storage you already pay for as part of your Google Workspace subscription, avoiding additional costs and complexity associated with a new cloud platform.
When to Consider Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
While Google Drive is perfect for everyday archival and retrieval, GCP’s dedicated storage solutions are designed for highly specific, programmatic needs. GCP cloud storage is necessary only when the data needs to be actively served or cataloged by external systems.
- Serving Data Programmatically: If you need to expose your data to a public-facing application, a website, or a programmatic retrieval process that needs to access data in a structured, consistent way.
- Highly Specialized Workloads: If your workflow requires the same dedicated storage buckets (like Amazon’s S3) for specific data management or compliance reasons.
For a pile of archive project files, the best and most effective course of action is to simply upload them to a dedicated Google Drive Shared Drive.
Watch: Managing Large Data with Google Cloud Platform
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Full Video Transcription
our creative team has 10 terabytes external drive with old project data and need to make space but can’t afford to lose the data i suggested a share drive as we have 300 terabytes of Google Workspace storage but not sure if it’s the best solution for this kind of storage could a GCP storage solution be better in the old days in the old days before we had the cloud when you had a creative business that had a lot of heavy assets might be an architecture firm working on plans and designs for skyscrapers it might be a video production business that’s shooting commercials could be a photography business that’s got you know a whole bunch of wedding photos and videos and stuff like that quite often businesses will end up with a lot of data i’ve been shooting videos for over a decade on YouTube and so I’ve got a hell of a lot of data as well and in the old days we would get a big storage array that would either be directly plugged into a server or maybe it’s just plugged into the network it would be a a DAZ or a NAS or a SAN and they stand for technical things but basically it would be a large array of hard drives and they would have redundancy for failover if something went wrong with them and that would protect your data then the cloud came along and Google and others made it really easy to store your data on the cloud now some of those apps were more kind of like consumer focused apps and really aimed at ease of use i’m talking about Google Drive Dropbox to a lesser extent One Drive because it’s kind of crappy and not that many people use it most people are still using either Dropbox or Google Drive now those solutions were great but if you’ve got really heavy files most people were kind of you know I guess a bit curious and concerned about whether or not really heavy file loads would work and there are dedicated solutions for very heavy file workloads like using an Amazon storage bucket it’s called S3 and you can send boatloads of data to S3 hundreds and hundreds and terabytes and probably even pabytes or whatever the next one is and that’s going to serve that back to you just fine whenever you need it there are specific archiving solutions as well which will take data that you seldom need to use but might want to bring it back once upon a time right every now and again you can use those but Google or Google cloud platform GCP for short has their own version of that as well they have data storage which is called I don’t know if it’s block storage that’s something I forget the name so one of the questions is should you use that block storage or should you use something like Google Drive to store these large files and my opinion is that Google Drive is just fine for most data like if you’ve got a 100 terabyte or so Google Drive is going to hand out handle that just fine particularly if you’ve got a large company and you’ve got a lot of users you’ve probably got quite a lot of space because all of the users in your Google Workspace account pull all of their storage together and everyone’s basically got access to a massive storage cap now you can restrict how much each individual user uses by setting a setting in the admin panel if you really want to lock that down but for the most part everyone by default gets access to a huge pool of data storage and let me tell you Google does not slow down for a second no matter how much data I throw at that so 47 tabytes so far and that’s absolutely fine now in fact I store all of my historical content data exactly what this questioner is asking about in our content folder you can see here I’ve got different folders for different years there’s a webinar that I ran here here we go we’ve got a recording all the way back in 2014 and this should play pretty much instantly even though that’s a very old file it’s probably a small file so it should play in the browser just fine here we go look at that old version of old version of Peter with hair so there you go you are able to pretty easily store and retrieve files straight from your Google Drive i see no reason why you wouldn’t just chuck it all in Google Drive google’s block storage or you know professional GCP cloud storage solution is more designed for when you want to move data and have it served in some way to someone maybe you want to expose it to an app maybe you want to expose it to a website maybe it’s absolutely critical that the cataloging of that data is done perfectly because I don’t know maybe it’s someone’s personal information maybe it needs to be stored in a programmatic way and be retrieved in a programmatic way okay cool in those cases that’s when you would maybe use Google’s cloud storage but if it’s just a whole bunch of archive stuff that’s sitting around on local individual USB drives I hope not or if it’s maybe sitting in a you know a NAS drive a storage server of some sort yeah sure these are great candidates to just plon them all in Google Drive and how do you get them up there well for the most part hopefully you got a good internet connection you drag and drop and you wait for them to upload and then you check them once they’ve been uploaded pretty straightforward process if you do need help with migrating data there are options available you can ship us a hard drive you can ship Google or Amazon a hard drive if you want to add things to their storage depending on how much data you’ve got you may decide to do that but these days people’s home fiber optic connections are pretty darn good and many of them are up to like 500 800 megabit even 1 gigabit connections and let me tell you that flies if you got 10 terabyte to upload it’ll probably knock that over in a couple of days that’s my take on backing up uploading your data where you should save it let me know what you think in the comments if you need more help with what we’ve covered in this video IT Genius provides support services to businesses all over the world with problems just like this click the link below to get started
Managing Large Data with Google Cloud Platform
itGenius 🤓 Biz Tech Experts · 379 views
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For creative agencies, architecture firms, video production houses, and photography businesses, dealing with massive volumes of historical data is a constant challenge. When 10 terabytes of old project files are sitting on local external drives, the immediate need is to free up space without losing the data. The decision often boils down to: should you use your existing Google Workspace storage (like a Shared Drive) or delve into a more complex platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? For the vast majority of small businesses, the answer is simple, accessible, and right under their noses: Google Drive.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The key steps to solving this problem are:
- Consolidate your archive data from local storage (like external USB or NAS drives) into a central location.
- Utilize your existing Google Workspace storage pool, which is typically a massive, shared data cap across all users.
- Upload the archive data directly to a Google Drive Shared Drive for easy access and retrieval.
- Reserve dedicated Google Cloud Platform storage for use cases where data needs to be served programmatically to an app or website.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For creative agencies, architecture firms, video production houses, and photography businesses, dealing with massive volumes of historical data is a constant challenge. When 10 terabytes of old project files are sitting on local external drives, the immediate need is to free up space without losing the data. The decision often boils down to: should you use your existing Google Workspace storage (like a Shared Drive) or delve into a more complex platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? For the vast majority of small businesses, the answer is simple, accessible, and right under their noses: Google Drive.
Q: Who is this guide for? A: This guide is for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and creative teams responsible for managing large volumes of non-active, historical data (e.g., photo/video archives, old project files) who want an efficient and accessible cloud storage solution.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The key steps to solving this problem are:
- Consolidate your archive data from local storage (like external USB or NAS drives) into a central location.
- Utilize your existing Google Workspace storage pool, which is typically a massive, shared data cap across all users.
- Upload the archive data directly to a Google Drive Shared Drive for easy access and retrieval.
- Reserve dedicated Google Cloud Platform storage for use cases where data needs to be served programmatically to an app or website.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For creative agencies, architecture firms, video production houses, and photography businesses, dealing with massive volumes of historical data is a constant challenge. When 10 terabytes of old project files are sitting on local external drives, the immediate need is to free up space without losing the data. The decision often boils down to: should you use your existing Google Workspace storage (like a Shared Drive) or delve into a more complex platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? For the vast majority of small businesses, the answer is simple, accessible, and right under their noses: Google Drive.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The key steps to solving this problem are:
- Consolidate your archive data from local storage (like external USB or NAS drives) into a central location.
- Utilize your existing Google Workspace storage pool, which is typically a massive, shared data cap across all users.
- Upload the archive data directly to a Google Drive Shared Drive for easy access and retrieval.
- Reserve dedicated Google Cloud Platform storage for use cases where data needs to be served programmatically to an app or website.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For creative agencies, architecture firms, video production houses, and photography businesses, dealing with massive volumes of historical data is a constant challenge. When 10 terabytes of old project files are sitting on local external drives, the immediate need is to free up space without losing the data. The decision often boils down to: should you use your existing Google Workspace storage (like a Shared Drive) or delve into a more complex platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? For the vast majority of small businesses, the answer is simple, accessible, and right under their noses: Google Drive.
Q: Who is this guide for? A: This guide is for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and creative teams responsible for managing large volumes of non-active, historical data (e.g., photo/video archives, old project files) who want an efficient and accessible cloud storage solution.
Q: What are the key steps to solving this problem? A: The key steps to solving this problem are:
- Consolidate your archive data from local storage (like external USB or NAS drives) into a central location.
- Utilize your existing Google Workspace storage pool, which is typically a massive, shared data cap across all users.
- Upload the archive data directly to a Google Drive Shared Drive for easy access and retrieval.
- Reserve dedicated Google Cloud Platform storage for use cases where data needs to be served programmatically to an app or website.
Q: What is itGenius? A: itGenius is an IT consultancy that helps small businesses scale effectively by providing affordable and effective technology services, specializing in Google Workspace support and strategy. We offer both transactional support and an “all-you-can-eat” Concierge subscription.
For creative agencies, architecture firms, video production houses, and photography businesses, dealing with massive volumes of historical data is a constant challenge. When 10 terabytes of old project files are sitting on local external drives, the immediate need is to free up space without losing the data. The decision often boils down to: should you use your existing Google Workspace storage (like a Shared Drive) or delve into a more complex platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? For the vast majority of small businesses, the answer is simple, accessible, and right under their noses: Google Drive.
