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Microsoft Plans Gdrive Competitor

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the personal-virtual-bill dept.

gambit3 writes "From Microsoft Watch: The MSN team is working on a new Windows Live service, code-named Live Drive, that will provide users with a virtual hard drive for storing hosted personal data. From early accounts, it sounds an awful lot like Gdrive, the still-as-yet-publicly-unannounced storage service from Google."

15 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Apple by tchalz · · Score: 4, Informative

    .Mac anyone?

    1. Re:Apple by eMartin · · Score: 5, Informative

      In case anyone needs further explanation...

      Apple has offered an online virtual hard drive since the OS 9 days (that's the previous millenium) with .Mac.

      It mounts as any other disk on your system, and even offers sharing with other people from that disk.

    2. Re:Apple by eMartin · · Score: 3, Informative

      Quicktime movie of it in action:

      http://www.apple.com/dotmac/idisk.html

  2. Amazon too by sonamchauhan · · Score: 2, Informative

    Amazon (!) has a "simple storage service".
    http://aws.amazon.com/s3

  3. Compare it to the original, please.. by nvrrobx · · Score: 4, Informative

    So in other words, it's actually like Xdrive, the company that started it in the dot-bomb boom.

    http://www.xdrive.com/

    Also, I can't wait for Palm to take them to court because Live Drive sounds an awful lot like LifeDrive.

    http://www.palm.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/lif edrive/

  4. Re:Striping? by joe_bruin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not so easily. It is unlikely that they will give you block-level access to the drive. That is, you can't format it. However, there is a solution. You just fill the drive with one huge file that contains a virtual disk image, and now you can format that with anything you want, and raid it with other disk images on other servers.

    As a bonus, you get disk encryption essentially for free. Here is a great app for Windows and Linux for creating and mounting encrypted drives in a file that I've used to do exactly this (on SMB servers). For those of you using XP, here is a guide on how to hack XP to enable the raid5 features that are disabled in the non-server versions.

  5. Re:need more than bandwidth for this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Bear in mind that .Mac is WebDAV, which is inherently kind of slow. WebDAV's clever, in that it's a file server running on an HTTP server, but definitely not the most efficient use of bandwidth.

  6. SoundBaster Live! by darkain · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have a Live Drive already, its called the bay device that comes w/ the high-end SoundBlaster Live cards, and its specifically called the Live Drive. So, does this mean Creative Labs gets to sue Microsoft over the name?

  7. RoamDrive by ThinkFr33ly · · Score: 4, Informative

    I use RoamDrive. It's free and works with Hotmail and Gmail.

    Eventually they promise a "pro" version that allows you to link as many hotmail and gmail accounts as your want (equating to essentially unlimited storage).

  8. Re:So... by ChatHuant · · Score: 2, Informative

    Microsoft's big secret Web 2.0 push is to copy everything Google does?

    You're not in sync with the Slashdot weltanschauung: Microsoft's secret is to preemptively copy everything Google might eventually do!

  9. Re:You'd have to be a fool to use something like t by thesatch · · Score: 0, Informative

    http://www.truecrypt.org/

    Problem solved.

  10. Re:free? by neoform · · Score: 3, Informative

    If the US government wanted your data that bad they could always just bust down your door and take it you know.

    (I say this since 4 weeks ago I had 7 guys come into my house and seize my computers for copyright infringement. apparently judges think an injunction/seizure is an apropriate way to make sure that "evidence" isn't destroyed.)

    --
    MABASPLOOM!
  11. Re:free? by sunwolf · · Score: 3, Informative
    I meen both in speach and beer


    Your "e" and "a" mysteriously swapped residences, jumping the two words in between. I have to say, I've never seen a spelling error quite like that before.
  12. contains adware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    scanned with
    http://www.virusbuster.hu/en/

    contains:
    Trojan.DL.Istbar.Gen.1

    so tread with extreme caution

  13. Re:Let's talk with our friends and relatives NOW. by deltx · · Score: 2, Informative

    You must not do any consulting. I have clients that are still complaining that their keyboard did not come with an any key.