Google Drive has been one of the best cloud storage services for years.
Now in 2021, you have Google One subscription to add to the profits.
This $1.99/month subscription gives a lot of benefits to the family and the manager of the account.
Google One Subscription – Benefits
To answer this question, one simple gain is to get a YouTube Premium subscription free trial for 3 month with this upgrade.
All you need to have is a credit card to pay for the above subscription on Google Play services.
Then all the family members can enjoy all the pros of this special service.
The following are the 7 pros of using Google One.
- Get additional cloud storage of 100GB for all the 6 members of your family
- Back up device data
- Free up account storage
- Save high-quality photos to Google Drive or Google Photos
- Get YouTube Premium free subscription for 3 months
- Chat/Email with Google Experts – 24/7 support
- Set Parental Controls for your Kids using Google Family Link
Let’s see how to access each advantage below:
1. Additional 85 GB of cloud storage in Total
With the free Google account, you get 15GB of free storage per person.
When you upgrade to Google One, you get additional 85GB of storage.
This can be shared by all the family members of your group. The family can consist of 6 members which includes you.
- Open the Google One app on Android.
- Tap Storage at the top.
You will see the message – You’ve got 100 GB of storage.
Below that you can see the storage details – Google Drive, Gmail, Google Photos, Family Storage.
2. Back up device data
Make use of Google Drive storage to save your photos, contacts, SMS messages, documents etc to the cloud.
On the Home tab, tap on “Set up data backup”.
The backup settings screen will open.
You can select the options that should be automatically backed up from the mobile.
Following are the backup options.
- Device data
- Multimedia messages
- Photos & Videos
Your smartphone needs Android 7.1.1 or higher to back up your multimedia messages.
Also, you can change the upload size to back up your photos and videos in full resolution.
If you have good mobile bandwidth and data plan, then you can back up your data using mobile data also.
Just enable that option.
3. Free up account storage
Since 6 members are using your Google One account, it can quickly get filled up with photos, videos and office attachments.
In that case, you can free up unnecessary files and folders using this option.
Tap on “Free up account storage”.
This way you can clean up files that you don’t need across Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos.
The following items are seen when you tap the above option.
- Discarded items – These included deleted emails, spam emails, deleted files on Google Drive which have moved to the recycle bin.
- Large items – These are emails with large attachments, large files on Google Drive, large photos and videos.
- Other items – These include unsupported videos.
You can also install the app “Files by Google” to clean up storage on your mobile.
4. Switch to Original Image quality on Google Photos
When you are on the free plan, the upload size of your Google Photos will not be counted to your Google Drive storage.
There are two ways to get free unlimited storage – High quality and Express.
On the Home tab, tap on “Set up data backup”.
On the next screen, you can see the “Photos & videos” option. Tap on “Switch to full resolution”.
This will store original quality images in your Google Photos.
If you want to change back to High or Express quality, make use of Google Photos settings.
This is useful, if you cancel Google One subscription.
But when you take photos with greater resolution i.e more than 16MP, you need to save in original quality resolution.
Otherwise, they will be compressed.
The con side of this is that original image size will be counted to your account storage.
So, as you keep filling your original quality images in Google photos, the free Google Drive storage of 15GB will soon saturate.
This is where the Google One paid storage comes into picture.
With a 100GB plan, you can store Original Image quality photos on your Google Photos and still don’t worry that your storage will be full.
If required you can upgrade to 200GB or 2TB plans.
This is very much useful for photography websites and people interested in taking high resolution images and videos.
5. YouTube Premium Trial Offer for 3 months
As we know, ads can be very tiresome to watch along with videos.
YouTube Premium provides an ad-free experience.
With Google One, you get this service free for 3 months.
You can watch music and commercial videos without any disturbance. Along With it, you get YouTube Music also free.
6. Support from Google Experts 24/7
When you have any problem with Google One services as mentioned above, you can always talk with Google Experts in native English.
They will be able to help you resolve the errors while adding family members, payment related errors, upgrading your account and many others.
As per the reviews on Google One, it is found that these experts are NOT much able to understand the customer problems.
They have no clue to some of the problems expressed by Google One subscribers.
But this feature is still useful, if you want technical support for small problems and guidance.
7. Parental Controls
As the Google One Family manager, you can add additional 5 members to your family group.
This includes kids and parents.
You can make other adult members of the family as parents.
This will make sure that they can monitor their kids’ activity.
Once you install the Google Family Link for Kids app on your children’s mobile or laptop, you can easily track their location.
You can set limits for their screen activity and app usage.
Account settings and controls can be managed by the parents.
Lock the screen of your child, if he is playing too much and many other parental activity.
