So, at a friend’s prompting (and that it struck me as a bargain) I paid $20 over to “Google paid storage” to give me 80GB storage for one year. This may be cheaper than Amazon S3 storage where the cost calculation is more complicated (see below ¹) and is significantly cheaper than dropbox which charges $9.99 per month for 50GB. However, if you read further you’ll see that this price is too good to be true.

What I paid for was essentially this, an extension of the normal storage space that Google provides for free for gmail, gdocs, picasa and so forth: “Google offers a way to purchase more storage space when you run out of free storage space in Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Blogger (for photos), and Google Buzz (for photos).”

So, in my google docs account I can now see that I’ve got 80GB available, but interestingly, if I want to access real “Google Storage” (ie. using an Amazon-S3-like API) it is something else, called Google storage for developers. Unfortunately, Google have named their products in a way that has confused me and is possibly confusing for others with these similar names.