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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."

3 of 238 comments (clear)

  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. Let's talk with our friends and relatives NOW. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As computer-literate individuals, it is our duty to talk to our less computer-savvy friends and relatives about these types of services.

    While it may seem very obvious to us, they might not stop to consider the privacy aspects of these services, be they from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.

    First of all, we need to make it clear that no financial data should be stored in such a way. That includes spreadsheets and archived tax filings.

    Second of all, any personal documentation should not be placed on such remote drives. This is especially important for the employees of businesses.

    Third of all, it must be realized that nothing will ever truly be deleted from such remote drives. One may think they have deleted their files, but it's quite likely that those files still exist on some server somewhere at Google or Microsoft, if not on backup tapes.

    We need to have these dicussions now, before many people make costly mistakes. It will save us time and effort in the long run, if we can wake up enough people to the potential issues that arise when using these services.

  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.