Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Absolutely. As long as your files are in a TrueCrypt volume.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"