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

wow 2 gig....

[josepha48]

.. um, I can get a USB pen drive with that much storage, is there some reason I'd need this storage space?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see why anyone would really need to have that storage online at MS or Google. Email maybe, but not data.

Re:wow 2 gig....

[smart_ass]

What about an easy, convient way for the masses to share files.
Lots of people don't have access to or don't know how to upload something to an FTP site. This will resolve that issue for when someone wants to give you a file >10MB (which causes email headaches)

It depends...

[Bender0x7D1]

The choice of storage for an individual depends on the nature of the data, the amount of data, the available bandwidth, the availability of a connection at all, what they are most comfortable with and what their idea of convenience is.

For example, you might not trust Microsoft or Google with your data even if it is encrypted. If you are in a competing business, you wouldn't want to store your business data on their servers. Alternatively, you may not trust them to provide you with the level of availability you desire. It doesn't help you if you can't access your data when you want it.

If you have a few hundred GB of data, you aren't going to want online storage. To access your data is going to take too much time. Even with decent bandwidth, anything more than a couple GB is going to give some serious delay. If you want to access the data at your grandparent's house and they use dial-up, online isn't an option.

Finally, if I am not comfortable with the online option, or I'm not comfortable with keeping my data in a single physical location, I'm not going to choose those options. Personally, I like having it on physical media that I can carry around. I like the bandwidth I get from a USB device and I don't have to worry about getting an online volume properly mounted.

On a side note, I don't trust the idea of "free" or even "cheap" online storage. The money for the hardware, bandwidth and administration have to come from somewhere. If I'm not paying for it directly, where is the money coming from? Either the company is getting some benefit from it - such as Google analyzing it for keywords to target advertising, or they are selling some sort of information about my data, or they are making it up in indirect costs (add $25 to the price of Vista). I would rather pay the direct costs so I know how much it is costing me; but that may be personal preference.

Re:It depends...

[cfulmer]

I concur. But, most people are limited by low upstream bandwidth. For example, my computer has about 400GB on it. At an upspeed rate of 512 kb/s, this will take 72 days to transmit, excluding network overhead, errors and so on.

In the mid 1990's, Newt Gingrich worried about people having an "Information Superhighway" in, but a footpath out. Thanks to today's asymmetric providers, this prediction has come true.

In fact, a switch to higher upstream bandwidth now has a new opponent: the content industry -- low upstream bandwidth also means that pirated movies can't transmit as fast.

Online v. Offline systems.

[strredwolf]

Wait, multiple companies tossing out storage like it's nothing, and the base price is a broadband connection?!?

Yet flash drives are comming down in price?

I mean, why would you need to waste bandwidth (which as noted can be expensive in some civilized nations) to pull in and work on files, when you can plug in a USB thumb drive with all your files in, or that spare 20 gig 2.5" drive, or a portable 3.5" drive, and work off of that? There are already distros out there that will boot off of USB drives. Why bother getting online when you don't need to be? What if you can't get online (no Wifi hotspot in the Nevada desert, and you forgot your EVDO card, plus Iridium is too expensive)?

Forget the Internet. Let's build up the Sneakernet.

Re:Not for me

[StikyPad]

I never understood AU/UK's propensity to charge by the KB. Sure, they have to route their traffic through undersea cables, but so do Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, etc, and unlimited usage is common in those places, as far as I can tell. Just seems like the AU ISPs are price gouging, particularly in light of the strength of the AUD as of late, meaning they're effectively paying less for their leases (assuming the cables are owned by foreign entities).

Re:Not for me

[Wolfbaine]

True, they're price gouging, but only because US ISPs price gouge them (sorry, word document). From the document:

International connectivity costs comprise the transmission link across the Pacific and the cost of access within the US. Under the internet charging arrangements, the non-US entity paid 100% of the transmission link costs to the US because the (peering or transit) agreements applied at the exchange point in the US. This seemed increasingly unfair as the balance of traffic shifted from 10:1 in favour of the US to 70: 301 and a heavy impost on non-US ISPs2 . The price of capacity from Australia was over US$100,000 per Mbps per month around 1993.

The costs have decreased since then but the bill to global ISPs from the US for peering in 2003 was still US$1.3billion. Of course the users get charged when the ISP is getting charged.

Local machine should just be a cache

[GCP]

My ideal setup would be one in which my local device is just a write-thru cache for my network storage. The "network computer" notion of fetching your applications on a JIT basis is attractive enough that it will one day succeed, but I'm talking about my personal data, not apps.

Back up should be a server responsibility, not a client responsibility. The client should be responsible for passing data/documents through to the *real* storage location ASAP (ideally, as the data is entered into the client). This wouldn't be considered backup any more than saving from RAM to a disk file now is considered backup. Saving to the server should just be "saving". And pros keep the server backed up, of course.

Since before long all of us will have multiple networked clients capable of serious work (our old laptop, our new laptop, our phone, etc.) and we'll want to be able to move transparently from device to device and keep working, and not lose data when we lose hardware, having our "one place" for data be a server somewhere, with the clients functioning as local caches, seems the natural way to go.

Whoever gets the usability right ought to have a huge hit on their hands. Will it be Microsoft, with their control over such a high percentage of "serious" client OSes? It would make sense to build this in as a transparent feature of every PC/device OS from MS, increasing the attractiveness of MS OSes on devices if that's what you use on your PC. Or will it be Google, with their openness to all clients, regardless of vendor?

Or will they miss the local cache idea altogether and just create an offsite network drive?

Re:Privacy

[QuantumFTL]

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

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

Interestingly enough, there are many in which merely allowing outside third parties to be aware of the existance of your data may be as bad as them being able to read it. Case in point: if you are arrested by a government in places that permit it, they may compell you to give your encryption keys, and thus they can read whatever they want. Your best bet against that kind of intrusion is to not have data, encrypted or otherwise, anywhere that you cannot physically destroy it. Of course some might call that paranoid, but isn't that what security is -- applied paranoia?

Re:Privacy

[Jugalator]

Case in point: if you are arrested by a government in places that permit it, they may compell you to give your encryption keys, and thus they can read whatever they want.

TrueCrypt supports two levels of plausible deniability to combat this though, and it's something that set it apart from other utilities like this.

TC can put a hidden "inner" volume inside your encrypted volume, that is simply mountable with a different password. But there's no way to prove that such a volume exist (TC volumes are indistinguishable from random data, and even file system and unused data is encrypted) and that you have more passwords than one for the "outer" regular encrypted volume.

The Big Issue is Trust

[queenb**ch]

It all boils down to this...

Would you rather trust..the borg collective or Google? Data is important...you don't want to just hand it over to anyone...

Left with the choice between the guys who bring you blue screens or the flawlessly functioning GMAIL...

Well, I guess you know where I'll be leaving my data.

2 cents,

QueenB

LiveDrive: Almost Live...!

[mlauzon]

Out of the 109 comments on this story, I am surprised no one tried to access Microsoft's LiveDrive, which you can do here:

http://drive.live.com/

You get the Live.com login page, and it logs you in...but it's a completely blank page, if you view source you get a blank document as well.