Google Docs To Host Any File Type

ezabi writes "According to a post on the official Google blog, in the coming weeks Google Docs will offer to host all file types with a limit of 250 MB, which as they say is larger than the current limit for email attachments. This will have its consequences: paid file sharing will die, more shared pirated material, newer vulnerabilities and malware distribution channels..."

Comments

What?

[FlyingBishop]

Is the summary a troll or just an attempt at sarcasm?

There are plenty of free filesharing sites, and 250mb is pretty paltry by their standards, not to mention the fact that Google has pretty decent standards for who it lets have an account. Given the amount of information they have on everyone, it's the last site you want to know if you're doing something illegal.

Unless I guess you count .gov domains.

Re:What?

[PCM2]

250mb is pretty paltry by their standards

It's not 250MB total storage space. It's 250MB maximum per file. It's probably true that most e-mail clients/servers do a poor job of handling 250MB attachments. In that sense, this is probably a good thing; we've all complained about the coworker who sends out a 15MB movie of their kids playing with the dog to a mailing list, but what option do most average users have? Even if they know what FTP is, they don't own any servers. If Google is going to handhold consumers through the process of storing big files in the Web instead of sending them as attachments, I say bravo.

Re:What?

[Paradigm_Complex]

Is the summary a troll or just an attempt at sarcasm?

It's an attempt to rationalize the situation, while interpreting the facts as the "ezabi" and/or the editors see them. Nothing so heinous as a troll, or overplayed as sarcasm.

There are plenty of free filesharing sites

All of which that I've seen have some limitations. Either you pay, or your bandwidth is capped, or you're limited to $files per $timeperiod, or $megabytes per $timeperiod, etc. As ezabi and/or the editors and I see it, it's unlikely Google is going to be quite as annoying or limited as they are with this regard. It's willing to subsidize the cost of the bandwidth for mindshare and long-term money. (ie, "Google's file service is so great I'll probably just use their other services too"). A free service from a household name with less frustrating limitations could very well grab the market.

and 250mb is pretty paltry by their standards

When you hit the filesize limit at most other file sharing sights, it's common to split the file into multiple files (usually via rar). That should work here - the limit isn't a big issue if Google lets you download the partial-files one after another. Consider youtube's length limit, and how it's circumvented by simply making a play list with multiple limited-length videos.

Even more important is the likely scenario that Google ups the limit as the service matures. Remember how much gmail used to allow at first? Take a look at what they offer now. It's not a reach to imagine a similar thing happening here. Harddrives are cheap, and Google has tones of experience scaling that up.

not to mention the fact that Google has pretty decent standards for who it lets have an account.

I'm guessing you've never read any comment ever on youtube? Google fights bots, but with humans it plays fast and loose with accounts, I'm not sure where you got the idea otherwise.

Given the amount of information they have on everyone, it's the last site you want to know if you're doing something illegal.

Despite the fact that they eventually gave in to China for censorship and various music and movie IP's on youtube, Google has been a pretty big advocate of such freedoms (well, from Big Brother and Big Media - not necessarily from Big Search Engine/Advertisement Service). They fought China, Viacom, et al on the issues before giving in, and they've fought the US on such issue as well (no links handy, hopefully another /.'er can oblige). Honestly, I'd be more inclined to trust Google with my info then a random filesharing service, if I had to trust anyone.

But here's the cool thing - you can log out, or make an account just for shady stuff and switch between the two. Heck, doesn't Chrome have some sort of privacy mode? Yes, Google could match the IP with past account info and maybe put two and two together. Even so, the idea that you're using Google vs $random_fileshare_sight doesn't really increase the odds of getting caught.

Or you could just keep it legal d:

It's possible Google is willing to ruin its still pretty solid reputation for user-rights by using this to hunt down illegal file sharers, and it's possible that Google will put huge limits and allow other services to compete, but those are both pretty long shots if you think it through and don't know anything relevant that I don't.

This changes things?

[L3370]

p2p users are targeted heavily by the anti piracy groups because p2p users are comprised largly by individuals with very shallow pockets.Google could potentially even the playing field here.

...Not to say that Google is doing it for this reason...or that piracy is justified. Just saying a company with this much influence could change the media industry's approach on combatting illegal activities.

Re:This changes things?

[AnotherUsername]

Perhaps those p2p users could simply purchase those movies that they wish to have. Or, even, get a Netflix account. But I suppose that 'Fighting the Man' has a better ring to it.

About split

[ls671]

> host all file types with a limit of 250 MB,

Can we just use split to store larger files ?

split -a 5 -b 250000000 bigfile

Re:About split

[QuantumLeaper]

Zip, Rar or some of file compression program will split files will work also.

Re:About split

[John Hasler]

> For that matter, how would a Linux user put it together? dd?

man cat

Re:About split

[ls671]

assuming that you are in an empty directory:

split -a 5 -b 250000000 sourcedir/bigfile

cat * > bigfile

in Windows:

type * > bigfile

Gzipped version:

tar -zc sourcedir/bigfile | split -a 5 -b 250000000 -

cat * | tar -zt 1> bigfile

P.S. I use -a 5 to backup entire disk images in 50MB files, -a 2 is usually the default. 2 will support up to 26*26 = 676 files in your archive.

Re:About split

[mweather]

You must work for a hard drive manufacturer.
Here's the correct way to do it:
tar -zc bigfile | split -a 5 -b 262144000 -

Re:About split

[ls671]

Nope, sorry, I do this on purpose to insure I never go above the actual limit. Who knows, maybe a hard drive manufacturer implemented the quota scheme ;-))

I am fully aware that my files will be slightly less than 250MB and this is exactly what I want ;-))

Nice try although...

Re:About split

[pydev]

Yes. I doubt the file size limit is there because Google doesn't like big files, it's there because it's hard on the infrastructure to upload/download bigger files in one step.

Microsoft has something similar

[PCM2]

Microsoft is moving into the ad-supported online hosting biz with SkyDrive. Looking at my SkyDrive right now, it tells me I have 24.99GB available space (I'm not really using it for anything). Among other uses, once Office 2010 ships, SkyDrive will be a portal to the Office 2010 Web Apps. If you upload Office documents to your SkyDrive, you will be able to click on them and view/edit them in your browser, without owning your own copy of Office.

Re:Microsoft has something similar

[Ethanol-fueled]

Heh, It would take 25 GB of free storage just to lure me back to Windows Live. Since I don't have enough time to look into it now, could you answer some basic questions for us such as:

• Requirements. Besides having a Windows live account, is there other software needed(IN short, will it work with Linux)?
• File upload limit. 1 TiB capacity is useless if the upload limit is only 5MiB per file.
• Other gotchas...like, is it a trial service where you have to haggle with a foreign call center to opt-out before they start charging you 50 bucks a month?
• Etc.

Re:Microsoft has something similar

[PCM2]

As the AC below said, files can be up to 50MB each (for now... I see no reason why Microsoft wouldn't up it to compete with Google).

It will work on Linux. It works fine with Firefox, and it even works on Chrome (even though Chrome is not officially supported). I think pretty much any standards-compliant browser should work (though I seem to remember I might have had a problem or two with Konqueror, even though Safari is one of the officially-supported browsers). IE users get a fancier upload tool via ActiveX, but that seems to be about it.

At present, it's sort of a "trial" in the sense that everything is pretty much still in beta. But Microsoft's stated intent is for everything to be ad-supported. I think the idea is to get initial revenue from ad sales, then hook customers into Microsoft's commercial desktop software.

On the downside, I didn't think the SkyDrive UI was all that impressive. Google Docs changes things up by presenting files as a chronological series based on what you've accessed most recently, kind of like an email inbox. SkyDrive tries to simulate the files-and-folders desktop paradigm, but it's really just for show. You don't have any of the flexibility of being able to drag and drop files, for example. It's a lot of clicking and waiting for page refreshes.

The UI for the Office Web Apps really is very slick, though, and they also seem to work fine with any modern, standards-compliant browser. (And that means not with IE6 -- it's not supported.)

This will also enable terrorists

[Anonymous Coward]

Before evil google did this evil thing, terrorists were forced to use rar to chunk their nefarious plans into sizes small enough for email attachments, or use horrible file sharing services like rapidshare which only makes them hate the west even more. Now their plans for global sharia will be made easier thanks to their malevolent brothers-in-arms over at google.

I hope those evil doers over at live workspace don't read this news because sharepoint is an even eviler tool for pirates and malware authors and satan himself.

Think tabloid headlines

[SmallFurryCreature]

The headline and summary has to attract eyeballs, more eyeballs, more posts, more activity more ads being viewed, more income.

I believe Miranda Hart's christmas special had a parody on a BBC prog, "Can twitter kill you". Reporter going around with ever more suggestive overvoice "do you know that right now your child is dying from twitter in this school", Worried Mom: "This isn't my child's school".

Simply stating that you can now store 250mb on your google account in a single file (wonder what the total limit will be) is amazing. Some HD maker must have had a very nice christmas.

Re:Will these be all public too?

[noidentity]

Paid file sharing dying would be a good thing, people shouldn't have to pay to share what is theirs.

They cost money because it costs money to share data. Or did you think bandwidth, servers, and storage were free?

Re:Will these be all public too?

[The End Of Days]

I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.

docs is getting some microsoft office flaws

[jollyreaper]

As in "bugs or missing features that are existing now for years without being addressed."

The biggest shortcoming I see is a lack of proper versioning. Docs will save every stupid edit you make every few seconds creating hundreds and hundreds of divergent versions. Utterly useless for tracking changes in drafts over time. The solution is fairly simple. You get a button up at the top that tells you which draft you're in. Click on it and you can spawn a new draft. So you start with your rough draft. When that's complete, you say "new draft" and here's your second draft. You can invite people to comment on a draft by draft basis. If you'd like, you could saw "I'm spawning off Joe's draft since he's going to make edits." If he's not going to edit, just comment, then you can let him have a go at the second draft. Then you can move on to your third draft, fourth, etc.

At this point in time the only solution is to manually create a new file called second draft, third draft, keep them all in the project folder and then manually compare changes. Kind of defeats the aweseomeness of docs here. Of the features I use in Word, this is the only place where Word has docs beat. Of course, nobody I know can use the comments and revisioning tools worth a damn so I'm not really getting proper mileage out of them. *sigh*

counterplex the idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Boggle.

It is so sad to get these reminders of just what a bunch of ignorant people fill the Net like counterplex.

Let's just refresh everyone's memory of searchable Google Voice:

* Google implemented search for Google Voice for people who decided to make their stuff public

* Dumbasses in the media tried to spin it as some sort of privacy violation

* Articles came out stating why the idiots babbling about privacy violation were spewing garbage since the only Google Voice stuff being indexed was stuff people decided to make public

* Same dumbasses in the media came out with 'yeah, but...I still want to be mad at Google followup articles'

Idiots like counterplex obviously just read the sensational headlines and parrot them as their own 'insight' into future stories.

thwarting of malware and piracy by Google brains?

[adosch]

Knowing Google, I'm sure they have actually thought about the repercussions of allowing all types of documents to be hosted/uploaded, or paving the way for mal/spy/shitware and alike or piracy. As much as everyone is going to look at the negatives, I"m sure Google has developed some sort of scalable trolling application to look for patterns or heuristics for that type of thing. After all, is Google not the king of the hill when it comes to data mining, pilfering, trends, habits, popularity of all of us already?

Re:Will these be all public too?

[EzInKy]

They cost money because it costs money to share data. Or did you think bandwidth, servers, and storage were free?

Users pay their ISP's for the bandwidth, can install a free OSS server on just about any machine, and with 2T drives available store data at a very reasonable cost. Again, vulnerabilities and malware are really the only downsides.

Re:Will these be all public too?

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual, you can make things as public as you want. After all, they are on-line. If you want to keep them for yourself... keep them in your computer, not "in the cloud".
Google offers e-mail, is it public? and can you search through it?
Google offers picture albums (Picasa). Are they public? Can you make them private and unlisted?
Google already offers google docs. The same thing, you can make them private or public.
Google voicemail messages were public, because users configured they settings to make them public. Why would this case be different?

Re:Will these be all public too?

[EzInKy]

I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.

Wrong. Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their free software and content.

Re:Will these be all public too?

[NeutronCowboy]

Then install an FTP server on your home connection and share away. You can even get a second connection so that you still have usable internet.

Sharing your own content is trivial and can be free (for small values of $cost). Sharing your content with the world in a useful way will be very expensive.

applications

[bcrowell]

TFA says:

More importantly, instead of carrying a USB drive, you can now use Google Docs as a more convenient option for accessing your files on different computers.

I know very few people who use USB keychain drives for this kind of thing. I teach physics lab courses, and when students need to bring home a spreadsheets or something, they just email it to themselves. I don't think the size limit is the main reason they don't use flash drives. One reason is that they don't know in advance that they're going to need one. The other is that email is less of a hassle.

If you're getting up into the amounts of data that can't go in an email attachment, then you probably need a full-fledged file synchronization utility like unison anyway. Unison is smart about recognizing data that haven't changed, and it also takes away the hassle and confusion that people experience with trying to keep straight all the different versions of files they have when they try to use a keychain drive for this. If you don't have a decent tool like this, then mirroring large amounts of data is likely to be slow, labor-intensive, and error-prone. TFA says:

In addition to uploading any file into Google Docs, our Google Apps Premier Edition customers will be able to seamlessly upload many files at once and sync them with their desktop in real time using third party applications.

Presumably the "Premier Edition" part means you'll have to pay. So for the majority of applications where you have this much data, Google will give you convenience or zero cost, but not both.

One exception I can think of is that this could be a nice, convenient way to make off-site backups of a certain amount of personal data (that novel you've been writing, ...) in case of fire or earthquake.

Re:applications

[Kalriath]

In addition to uploading any file into Google Docs, our Google Apps Premier Edition customers will be able to seamlessly upload many files at once and sync them with their desktop in real time using third party applications.

Presumably the "Premier Edition" part means you'll have to pay. So for the majority of applications where you have this much data, Google will give you convenience or zero cost, but not both.

Premier Edition is $50 USD per user per year.

Pricing info

[FleaPlus]

It doesn't seem that anyone else commenting on the article has noticed this yet, but if you click through to the Google Docs blog it has the pricing info:

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-and-store-your-files-in-cloud.html

Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.

Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.

Again, after the 1gb limit, that $0.25 per gb-yr. By comparison, Amazon S3 is $0.15*12=$1.80 per gb-yr, almost an order of magnitude more expensive.

Re:Pricing info

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're not even taking into account the bandwidth costs associated with Amazon S3. Google Docs has no bandwidth cost (yet).

Amazon S3 is an amazing service, but it's quite expensive on a $/GB-YEAR ratio, especially once transfer costs are added in. $0.25/GB-YEAR is quite reasonable.

Re:Will these be all public too?

[geekmux]

I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.

Wrong. Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their free software and content.

Ah, let me make that statement a bit more accurate...

Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their stolen software and pirated content.

The average torrent junkie doesn't buy 8TB of disk and upgraded bandwidth plans because they really like sharing Linux ISOs...Please.

Torrent plz?

[jameskojiro]

will now become "Gdoc plz?"

FUSE

[johnkzin]

How long before we see a FUSE plugin that lets you treat this like an NFS server?
(or did I miss it, and one already exists?)

Re:Will these be all public too?

[EzInKy]

Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their stolen software and pirated content.

Your software was stolen? Are you sure you didn't just misplace it? Scan your drives again to make sure it's really gone.

The average torrent junkie doesn't buy 8TB of disk and upgraded bandwidth plans because they really like sharing Linux ISOs...Please.

I can see it now. ACTA paragraph 666 - no person shall possess more than 640kb of storage without a license. That, after all, is enough for anybody.

Re:Will these be all public too?

[ozmanjusri]

I never really trusted putting any of my documents in google docs at all.

I never really trusted putting any of my documents online at all.

Not unless I;

• wanted them to be seen,
• they were unimportant enough that it didn't matter if they were seen,
• or if I'd encrypted them.

Putting documents online is putting them in a public space. You only do that if you want them to be available.

Re:Will these be all public too?

[noidentity]

Your software was stolen? Are you sure you didn't just misplace it? Scan your drives again to make sure it's really gone.

Once I found some stolen software and downloaded it so I could burn it on a CD and return it to its owner. He wasn't interested, for some reason. I even offered to mail it to him. I don't think he had bought new software, either, so I guess he just didn't need it anymore. People are confusing when it comes to stolen software.

Re:Will these be all public too?

[The End Of Days]

I get your point, but did you have to use the most annoying textual construct of the modern internet era to do so?

It would only be worse if you did one of those snarky parenthetical explanations (read: this shit.)

SDF

[The End Of Days]

I imagine when someone makes a post about "stolen" copyrighted materials, this is what shows up on your computer:

Semantic defense squad to the rescue! We have a situation we need to derail with a meaningless argument immediately.

Guess what, so does every webhoster out there.

[Hurricane78]

I put it on MY server, so that I own it.

I still don’t get why anyone would be so crazy to host anything important on a company’s server. Especially one that is known as the ultimate data kraken.

Duplicity!

[nemesisrocks]

I'm waiting for the Duplicity plugin!

Encrypted backups, for half the money Amazon S3 charges...

Re:Will these be all public too?

[Kleen13]

Since Google is a US company, does that mean that any documents I store online from Canada are subject to perusal by DHS as well?

Wait...

[symbolset]

They sell movies? When did that start? Next you'll be saying they say they sell music. The very idea is ridiculous. Who would pay for that?

Pity uploading via browser still sucks.

[AaronLawrence]

Why are browsers so horribly unfriendly for uploads?

Perhaps Google could put some money into fixing Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338
or improving it
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468

Does Chrome have a decent upload UI? I can't recall ...