Amazon Glacier vs Google Drive: What are the differences?

What is Amazon Glacier? Low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. In order to keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.

What is Google Drive? Integrate your app with Google Drive. The Drive SDK gives you a group of APIs along with client libraries, language-specific examples, and documentation to help you develop apps that integrate with Drive The core functionality of Drive apps is to download and upload files in Google Drive. However, the Drive SDK provides a lot more than just storage..

Amazon Glacier belongs to "Data Backup" category of the tech stack, while Google Drive can be primarily classified under "File Storage".

Some of the features offered by Amazon Glacier are:

• Low cost – Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month.
• You store data in Amazon Glacier as archives. An archive can represent a single file or you may choose to combine several files to be uploaded as a single archive. Retrieving archives from Amazon Glacier requires the initiation of a job. Jobs typically complete in 3 to 5 hours. You organize your archives in vaults.
• Secure – Amazon Glacier supports secure transfer of your data over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and automatically stores data encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.

On the other hand, Google Drive provides the following key features:

• Create & collaborate.- In Google Drive, you can create new documents, spreadsheets and presentations instantly. Work together at the same time, on the same doc, and see changes as they appear.
• Work better with the products you use everyday.- Say goodbye to bulky email attachments. Send a link from Google Drive in Gmail and everyone has the same file, same version—automatically. Your pictures in Google Drive are instantly available in Google+, so you’re never more than one click away from sharing with your circles.
• Powerful search.- Google Drive helps you get to your files faster. Search for content by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Google Drive can even recognize objects in your images and text in scanned documents.

"Cold Storage" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon Glacier over the competitors, whereas "Easy to use " was stated as the key factor in picking Google Drive.

Lyft, StackShare, and Asana are some of the popular companies that use Google Drive, whereas Amazon Glacier is used by CodeCombat, Arabiaweather Inc., and Scribd. Google Drive has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2093 company stacks & 2018 developers stacks; compared to Amazon Glacier, which is listed in 24 company stacks and 9 developer stacks.