Data Backup Digest

Google One is a storage subscription service that shares capacity across a variety of Google products like Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. Membership can be for individuals or for families, with benefits shared across the group.

It launched two years ago and has changed over the years for the better, offering expanded storage plans, the ability to share the storage with your family, live support, and member benefits like Google Play credits and Google Store member rewards.

Perhaps most importantly, Google One began automatic phone backups for members on Android devices last year. Consider that the majority of our data is now created away from traditional desktop computers and on smartphones – pictures, videos, messages, emails, and more are all trusted to our handy smartphones. It was great that Google were finally making a push to unify the backup of this data, much like Apple have been doing for eternity with iCloud.

Now, Google have announced that they are making phone backup (and a new storage manager tool) free to Google users for Android and iPhone devices. This means that you can backup Google Photos, Google Drive, and Gmail data directly from your smartphone to Google One. This means that if you lose or break your phone, your data is safe in the cloud and not lost forever.

You don’t even need to have a Google One membership to take advantage of this; all you need is a Google account. Since stock Android runs off Google apps (and many manufacturers choose to use them instead of producing their own), this is great news. iPhone users can download an iOS app that lets you store photos, videos, contacts, and calendar events with Google.

Users get 15 GB of free storage with a Google account, which should be ample for the average user. Of course, this can be upgraded at a reasonable fee with a paid Google One account if necessary. Additional storage starts at $1.99/month for 100 GB of storage.

Alongside this change is the introduction of a new storage manager. While storing your data is important, it’s equally vital that you can easily manage and clean up the data. You can easily and quickly review how you’re using your storage and see what could be removed to free it up. You can keep the files you want and remove the ones you no longer need.

For example, the tool will tell you how much storage is being wasted on deleted emails, spam emails, and deleted files, and you can remove these within a few clicks. It also tells you what large files you have stored across the various services – perhaps some HD videos that are clogging up Google Drive.

These changes are available now for Android and you can download the Google One app from the Play Store. The iOS app will be available soon, with no confirmed date. You can also use the new storage manager tool from your browser. It’s also worth noting that these changes only impact personal Google accounts and aren’t available for G Suite customers.