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

Not for me

[Fred Nerk]

It's not going to work for me for a number of reasons:

1. I'm in Australia, and bandwidth is expensive in Australia. Cable ISPs offer plans like 10gb per month, and some DSL ISPs offer up to 60-70gb per month. Some are upstream + downstream added together. It's not much when you're considering storing your stuff on the net.

2. I'm on cable, and the upstream bandwidth is terrible. 64k if I'm lucky. I really don't want to wait hours to store my files on somebody elses server.

3. I'm sure plenty of people will make statements like "What about the privacy!? I don't want google looking at pictures of my kids!". I don't really care, but it's certainly an issue.

Re:Not for me

[Nutria]

why are you *hiding* you kids pics?

A sadistic perv sees my documents, sees children's pictures, thus:

1. knows where we live
   
2. knows what my children look like
   
3. knows where they've been on vacation, what they like to do, where they go to school, etc
   
4. tracks them down
   
5. strikes up conversations with them
   
6. seems to be a family friend, since he knows so much about us
   
7. convinces one of them to get in the car
   
8. rapes him/her
   
9. kills him/her
   
10. dumps body in the river, never to be seen again
    
11. goes on to the next target
    
12. family is destroyed

Hypothetical, yes, but It Could Happen.

Re:Not for me

[aesiamun]

stay off the internet...

A lot COULD happen...the chances are slim that they will.

I prefer something in my pocket

[Phantombrain]

If you have something in your pocket, nobody can get hte files from where their stored unless they get access to my disk, which I can personally prevent. I can't do anything about a hacking or a company releasing them to the public if they are on a server.

Re:I prefer something in my pocket

[Phantombrain]

True, but if the files are encrypted in, for example, RSA 128-bit they can pass your files around all they want and never figure out the contents. Of course this is for sensitive data... there are tons of files on my computer I could upload that I wouldn't care if someone got their hands on.

They can also never figure out the contents if they never get the files in the first place.

I can see potential uses

[The_Revelation]

I can see the benefit of having online storage. I could put an ass load of movies and mp3s on it and potentially have it streaming to a digital media device if it had sufficient bandwidth. I can't think of any devices like this that I own off the top of my head, but who knows what MS are planning for their "iPod Killer" or whatever it is now.

Re:It depends...

[swillden]

If you have a few hundred GB of data, you aren't going to want online storage.

I have a few hundred GB of data, and I want online storage. Why? Backups. For actual use, I'll have all my data stored locally, but what if my machine dies/house burns down, etc.? I'd love to have an online service I can use to store backups. If I lose my local copy for some reason, I won't care if it takes a while to restore it, I'll just be glad I *can* restore it.

Re:Privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

How long would it take to crack a 6 character password using today's technology? A 10-character password? How about using the technology of 10 years from now? When you let someone else hold your data, unless you're carrying around a one-time pad (in which case just carry the data itself), your level of security goes down tremendously.

K-OS Switch?

[Just Some Guy]

What about the K-OS "Switch"? A friend of mine is trying to decide whether to invest in this company, and I'm kind of trying to warn him away from it ("Patented 1024-bit encryption!", and the fact that they're building a proprietary service on top of GPL software which seems a bit unstable as a business plan). My friend knows the guy who started this, and that guy claims his little computer was the original plan for Google's GDrive, but that they only offered him $500 million and that wasn't enough.

Now that I see this in writing, I have a few hundred extra alarm bells going off. Still, is something like that even remotely feasible?