LiveDrive vs GDrive vs Personal Data Storage?

ozmanjusri asks: "At a blogger's breakfast prior to the opening of Tech.Ed in Sydney, Microsoft Australia technical specialist John Hodgson has confirmed that Microsoft will introduce its LiveDrive online storage system which can be mapped directly as a Vista drive. The service will offer 2GB of space free, with additional capacity available at a cost. Earlier this year, rumors surfaced regarding a similar scheme from Google, the GDrive. There are already hacks to do this with GMail, but Google's goal with GDrive appears to be infinite storage, accessible from anywhere. Meanwhile, the price of portable USB flash drives has been falling to the point where 2GB drives are cheap enough for every day storage purposes. Is this the start of a new era of (nearly) free online storage, thin clients and OS independent services? Will data storage which is tightly integrated to the OS be more attractive to the average user, or will we prefer to have our information stored on a physical media we can put in our pockets?"

Comments

"LiveDrive"? How creative.

[tepples]

Another company already has a computer related product called "LiveDrive". It's a bank of front-panel audio receptacles for Creative sound cards, all in one 5.25" drive bay.

Re:OSS package to provide this type of service?

[ximenes]

The best thing I have found that exists in a ready-to-be-used state (as opposed to the countless hordes of maybe-someday projects) is vtfileman. Its available at http://vtfileman.sf.net/ and there are at least two instances of it running at universities (http://filebox.vt.edu/ is the original and http://filer.case.edu/ is the one that I run). I have some implementation notes on installing Filer at http://filer.case.edu/wiki/filer/notes

It does have a lot of other requirements though, such as an LDAP server for accounts, Apache to serve the HTTP and WebDAV pages, Apache Tomcat for the JSP interface and proftpd if you want FTP access. However, it is pretty sweet once its running.

If thats too complicated, you may be better off just making WebDAV shares individually for different groups. Personally I like that with vtfileman, people can set up their own accounts with little to know interaction with the system administrator.

By far not the first of its kind

[davidwr]

.Mac's been around for a few years and harks back to the OS 9 or earlier days. I think "on the desktop" BBS/Internet based storage solutions for personal computers predate that.

Re:Privacy

[Red Alastor]

Do I trust them to host my files and not go through them?

Absolutely. As long as your files are in a TrueCrypt volume.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

Re:Not for me

[macrom]

Try downloading from MSDN during the day. I get rates that are more in line with a baseline DSL connection than the OC3 my company provides. I never have this problem from sites like Apple (connect.apple.com, not sure from where the downloads for developers actually originate), Akamai, etc. Maybe other parts of Microsoft's network offer fast download rates, but not MSDN. At least not in my recent experience.

Free services already exist

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive been using mozy.com for several months and seems to work pretty well. the first 2GB are free and you can rent more or get free increments if you get your frinds to sign up. you can also encrypt your data. then again it may turn into xdrive.com that started out free and then went totally commercial.

I like services like this since it give me another option for backups. if something were to happen to my residence..say a hurrican or earthquake then my drives would be lost. at least i have an off-site source of some of my most important data.

AGP

Re:Almost important

[stinerman]

You do understand that "Allah" is the Arabic word for "God", right? Yahweh is God is Allah. Just a reminder...

There already is free online storage

[kungfujesus]

filefront.com has free unlimited file storage, i've used it for a long time and like it very much. but GDrive sounds hawt cause shell integration :)

Re:Not for me

[complete loony]

Those undersea cables required a huge investment, we are a looong way from the US. We have a low population density, it's a long way between our few population centres which aren't that large anyway. And we've had most of our internet traffic routed through a government owned and operated monopoly (Telstra) for ages. ISP's for the most part also have to pay by the GB for most of their traffic and certainly can't afford to give you an all you can eat service.