How Much Art Can You Store With 15gb Of Cloud Storage

After sharing My strategy for organizing digital art files , I became curious…how much art you can store in a free google drive account? How long can you go without spending money on cloud storage if you have 15GB? How much data do you produce annually in art files? To answer these questions, I did some math based on my own files.

Let’s take a look at the numbers. I’ll be using my 2022 data as I created the most in that year. In 2022, I created 169 .clip (clipstudiopaint) files with sizes ranging from 367kb to 1,266,694kb. After removing outliers, the average file size is 21312.99KB (0.0203GB). My canvas size is usually around 2000x2000px, rarely going higher than 4000x. I like using a lot of layers, but my files usually stays below 20 layers.

Graph for nerds!

Now that we know the average file size for a very productive year (169 files equates to 0.47 a day) we can calculate how long it’ll takes to fill a free google drive!

Annual Data Production: 169 × 21,312.99 KB = 15,728,640 KB

Storage Compacity in KB: 15×1,024×1,024 KB =15,728,640 KB

Years to Fill Google Drive: 3,601,895.31 KB / 15,728,640 KB ≈ 4.37 years

Of course, each artist is different, so let’s see how the number changes with changes if your average file size is 20% bigger, 20% smaller, and also if you draw less frequently.

Conclusion

My drive uses 75GB of my 100GB allowance, since I store more than just .clip files. If you just need to backup a few raw files, you can get by without spending any extra money for at least two years.

I hope you found this interesting. I really would have liked to spend more time on this, but I also knew that my data to begin with was biased. Sorry for the bad math, I wish I had more expertise in data management to know what I’m saying.