Amazon S3 vs Google Drive 2024: Which Is Better to Choose?

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What Is Cloud Drive?
What Is Amazon S3 and Google Drive?
Comparation between Amazon S3 vs Google Drive
Transfer Files between Amazon S3 and Google Drive
Conclusion

What Is Cloud Drive?

As a professional cloud storage tool, cloud drive is a product of Internet cloud technology, which mainly provides storage, view, downloading and other services for businesses and individuals. Cloud drive can store your data anytime and anywhere. And it is more convenient compared to other actual hard disk since you don't need to bring your stored files or data with you at any time. With features such as synchronization, storing, sharing, downloading, one-click saving, online playback and searching, Cloud Drive is able to meet the changing requirement diversity of users.

Amazon S3 and Google Drive are two of the most popular cloud drives nowadays. This article compares Amazon S3 vs Google Drive comprehensively based on price, storage space, security, and more. If you are going to choose a cloud drive between these two cloud storage services, please read this article, it may be helpful for you.

When comparing AWS S3 vs Google Drive, we first need to understand the basic concept of both of them. Then we can get a broadly understanding on the nature of work of AWS S3 and Google Drive, and also the difference between the way to store files.

What Is Amazon S3 and Google Drive?

The following is the concept of Amazon S3 and Google Drive, hope you can have a simple understanding of Google Drive and Amazon S3 after reading.

What Is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3, also known as Amazon Simple Storage Service or Amazon Web Services (AWS S3), is a service provided by Amazon Web Services that offers storage through a Web service. It can be used to store any type of object, allowing use for storing Internet application, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, data archiving, data lakes for analytics, hybrid cloud storage, and others.

The basic storage units of Amazon S3 are objects organized into storage buckets, each of which is uniquely identified by a user-assigned key, meaning the file has a unique name or ID. And the file can download objects using the HTTP GET interface and the BitTorrent protocol.

Tip: Amazon S3 vs Amazon Drive

When we talk about Amazon S3, people may think of Amazon Drive. They look similar, but they are not the same actually. Although both are part of Amazon's cloud services, Amazon S3 is a cloud service provided by Amazon Web Services that can store any type of files, while Amazon Drive is a file hosting service and cloud storage provided by Amazon, which is mainly for storing pictures.

What Is Google Drive?

Google Drive

Google Drive is a file storage and sync service, which simply means that it stores and organizes data in a hierarchical model as shown in the figure below: the main folder contains two subfolders, and the subfolders contain file data.

Google Drive allows users to store files on Google's servers, sync files across devices, and also share files. It includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides, and other Google office suite (Google Workspace) document editors.

Comparation between Amazon S3 vs Google Drive

Which one is better, Amazon S3 or Google Drive? We can judge from the following comparison of Amazon S3 and Google Drive.

AWS S3 vs Google Drive: Pricing and Storage

Amazon S3 and Google Drive are both cloud file managers, which means they generate a lot of users and they will handle a lot of data for these users. Therefore, there will be higher requirements in terms of price and storage space. So, what is the price between them? Please refer to the table below.

♦Pricing of Google Drive

Object	Version	Storage	Price	Cost
Individuals	Google Drive	15 GB	Free	0
	Google One	100 GB	$1.99/month	$0.0199/GB
		200 GB	$2.99/month	$0.0150/GB
		2 TB	$9.99/month	$0.0049/GB
Business	Business Starter	30 GB/user	$6/month	$0.2/GB
	Business Standard	2 TB/user	$12/month	$0.0059/GB
	Business Plus	5 TB/user	$18/month	$0.0035/GB

♦Pricing of Amazon S3

Version	Storage	Price
S3 Standard	First 50 TB/month	$0.023/GB
	Next 450 TB/month	$0.022/GB
	Over 500 TB/month	$0.021/GB
S3 Intelligent - Tiering	Frequent Access Tier, first 50 TB /month	$0.023/GB
	Frequent Access Tier, next 450 TB /month	$0.022/GB
	Frequent Access Tier, over 500 TB/month	$0.021/GB
	Infrequent Access Tier, all storage/month	$0.0125/GB
	Archive Access Tier, all Storage/month	$0.004/GB
	Deep Archive Access Tier, all storage/month	$0.00099/GB
	Monitoring and Automation, all Storage/month (objects>128 KB)	$0.0025/1,000 objects
S3 Standard - Infrequent Access	All storage/month	$0.0125/GB
S3 One Zone - Infrequent Access	All storage/month	$0.01/GB
S3 Glacier	All storage/month	$0.004/GB
S3 Glacier Deep Archive	All storage/month	$0.00099/GB

With the two tables about AWS S3 vs Google Drive cost and storage, we can speculate that Google Drive is more suitable for individuals and small businesses. If you are a large business or a medium-sized company which manages a large amount of assets, you can choose Amazon S3 as your cloud drive because the price will incur lower costs as you store more data.

Amazon S3 vs Google Drive: Security

As both are network cloud storage tools, of course every user will concern about the security performance of Amazon S3 and Google Drive. So how is the security of Google Drive and Amazon S3 respectively?

Difference between Google Drive and Amazon S3 in Security

Amazon S3 offers industry-leading security for everyone. AWS S3 protects your account and files by blocking public access, locking object, AWS Trusted Advisor, encryption, identity and access management, and more. If you store your data in Amazon S3, Amazon S3 will use encryption features and access management tools to protect files from unauthorized access.

Google Drive also makes great efforts to protect our account and data. For example, it performs double identity verification when we access our Google Drive account, and Google Drive has SSL encryption and TSL standard encryption for protecting files and data in Google Drive. For our single file or data, Google Drive provides us with an individual encryption key as a way to encrypt our data.

After comparing Amazon S3 vs Google Drive, we can find that Both Google Drive and Amazon S3 use authentication, file encryption and other features to protect our files and privacy. So, whether you choose Amazon S3 or Google Drive, both cloud drives have safeguards in terms of security features to protect your privacy.

Transfer Files between Amazon S3 and Google Drive

What should we do when we have both Amazon S3 and Google Drive accounts and want to be able to transfer files between them? Here we suggest two different methods to you:

One is to download the files from Google Drive and then upload them to Amazon S3 manually, this traditional method looks simply but the operation steps are very tedious and a waste of time.
The second method is to use MultCloud, a multiple cloud storage manager, as an intermediary to transfer files from Amazon S3 to Google Drive or transfer files from Google Drive to Amazon S3.

MultCloud is a web-based cloud file manager which allows you to manage more than 30 leading cloud drives, such as Amazon S3, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and other popular clouds, in a single interface with just one MultCloud account for completely free.

MultCloud can help you to transfer, sync, backup, or copy files from one cloud drive to another without downloading and uploading operations by “Cloud Transfer” or “Cloud Sync”. What’s more, you can easily manage files in your cloud accounts by Upload, Download, Copy, Cut, Preview, Rename, Remote Upload, and 3 file sharing modes.

Therefore, using MultCloud makes it very easy to transfer files between clouds. And below are the simple steps about how to use MultCloud to transfer files between Amazon S3 and Google Drive.

How to Transfer Files between Amazon S3 and Google Drive Using MultCloud

Here is a case about how to transfer files from Google Drive to Amazon S3, and this case is also suitable for you to backup Google Drive to Amazon S3 with ease. Hope it is useful for you.

Step 1: Sign up MultCloud and log in.
Step 2: Click “Add Cloud” and add your Amazon S3 and Google Drive accounts to MultCloud.

Add Amazon S3 and Google Drive to MultCloud

Tips:

When you add a cloud drive to MultCloud, you will be prompted if you want to license it to MultCloud.
MultCloud set no limit on the number of adding clouds.

Step 3: Click “Cloud Transfer”, add Google Drive to the source and Amazon S3 to the destination in the Cloud Transfer page, then click “Transfer Now”.

Transfer Google Drive to Amazon S3 in MultCloud

Under the Source and Destination option there are three additional options, namely “Options”, “Schedule”, and “Task Name”.

Options: You can set the way of file transfer, for example: delete all source files after transfer is completed.
Schedule: You can set daily, weekly, or monthly scheduled cloud file transfer tasks at a certain time to transfer files from cloud to cloud periodically.
Task Name: You can reset the task name at task 1, which is convenient to distinguish it from other task names.

Tips:

1. You can check the file transfer progress by entering the “Task List”, and you can click “Cancel” if you don't want to transfer files.
2. If you need, MultCloud can send an email notification to you when the transfer task is done.
3. As a free user of MultCloud, you could transfer files through fast speed within 30 GB data traffic per month. If you have a higher demand on transferring large size of files, you’d better upgrade your MultCloud account so that you are able to transfer files through extremely increased fast speed from 150 GB data traffic per month to unlimited data traffic.
4. You are able to enjoy another advanced function of Cloud Transfer called “Filter” after upgrading account. Filter can help you ignore or only transfer files with certain extensions.
5. You can also use this excellent feature to transfer files between Amazon S3 accounts and Google Drive accounts.

MultCloud can help you transfer Google Drive to Amazon S3 without too many steps, and you can use the same way to transfer files from Amazon S3 to Google Drive as well. In addition, you can use MultCloud for file synchronization. The Cloud Sync feature can automatically sync file from one cloud to another in one way or two ways through 1 of 9 distinctive sync modes, thus syncing files between clouds and also preventing data loss.

Conclusion

This article compares the price, storage space, and security of Amazon S3 vs Google Drive and find the difference between Google Drive and Amazon S3 clearly.

From these comparisons of AWS S3 vs Google Drive, our recommendation is that if you are a large enterprise or a medium-sized enterprise that needs to manage a lot of data, you can choose Amazon S3 as your cloud drive. As we know from the pricing that the more space You use in Amazon S3, the more affordable it is. And if you use cloud drive for personal or small business, you can choose Google Drive instead.

Furthermore, if you have multiple cloud drives and want to transfer files between them, you can try MultCloud which has been mentioned in the article to transfer files from one cloud drive to another easily and quickly. You can also use it to easily sync files, folders, or clouds and set up scheduled sync tasks to automatically sync Amazon S3 to Google Drive at a specific time.

MultCloud Supports Clouds

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