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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."

5 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. 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/

  3. 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.

  4. 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).