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.

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

[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...

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

[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.

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?

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?

[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?

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.

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.

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?

[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.

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.

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 ...