Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Google is expanding its Internet warehouse so people can stash more digital keepsakes from their life and work.
The upgrade announced Tuesday will provide one free gigabyte of storage to all users of Google Docs, the company's online suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other commonly used programs.
The expansion will let people store photos, video and a variety of other computer files that previously couldn't be accommodated. Each file can be as large as 250 megabytes, and those needing more space can buy it at prices ranging from $17 (£10) annually for an extra 5 gigabytes to $14,000 (£8,620) annually for an extra 4,000 gigabytes.
Google already offered unlimited storage for files that were automatically converted into the Docs format. With the change, Google Docs will store files in their original format, and only those will count toward the limit.
Subscribers to Google's $50-a-year (£30) Docs service will continue to get more advanced features.
The increased capacity will be phased in by the end of the month.
It's the latest step in Google's crusade to make it easier, cheaper and more convenient to store information in its data centers instead of on individual computers in homes and offices. This remote method of storage has become known as "cloud computing."
Google, the Internet's search leader, has embraced cloud computing in hopes of making people more dependent on its services, while undercutting rival Microsoft Corp., which makes most of its money from selling software that's installed on individual computers.
Microsoft has been fighting back with its own cloud computing products, including a service called SkyDrive that offers 25 gigabytes of free storage. Although that's 25 times as generous as Google's service, SkyDrive can't store individual files larger than 50 megabytes, one-fifth the limit now imposed by Google Docs.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments