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: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.

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.