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Google Close To Launching Cloud Storage 'Google Drive'
MrSeb writes with this selection from ExtremeTech: "Why doesn't Google offer a cloud storage service to rival Dropbox, Box.net, or Microsoft's SkyDrive? Google has the most internet-connected servers in the world, the largest combined storage of any web company, and already offers photo storage (Picasa), document storage (Docs), music storage (Music), but for some reason it has never offered a unified Google Drive. According to people familiar with the matter, however, our wait is almost over: Google's Hard Drive In The Sky is coming soon, possibly 'within weeks.' Feature-wise, it sounds like Google Drive will be comparable to Dropbox, with free basic storage (5GB?) and additional space for a yearly fee."
More ways for Google to know what you're doing. Will they be scanning your documents? Checking the artist names of the songs you have there and target ads related to them? What about <fill in your own scenario here>?
We need a "just works" encryption system for this, so google doesn't know what is stored.
I thought Google Drive would be reserved for the self driving cars! ;)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Can I get an account on an alternate TLD with a guaranty that my data won't be on an American server to protect it from American imperialism?
Never mind then.
Who will trust their files to a .com located in the USA?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I wonder if this will also finally allow google apps for business domains to have centrally managed storage? Or will this still be tied to individual user accounts like the current storage facilities? The current scenario of tying storage to individual user accounts is a major oversight by google IMO.
Ooooh 5 Gigs!
Microsoft for all of the bashing it takes gives 25 GB for free. It can be mounted like a network drive, etc.
But what if it rains?
If docs, pictures and music are covered, might as well call it Google Porn Drive.
They'd have to offer me more than 5gb for free if they want me to give up my Dropbox.
What with the recent Dropbox mobile app give-away, linking my account to Twitter, posting a spam tweet, deleting spam tweet, completing their 'training', getting a couple of friends to join... I have 8gb for free.
If Google could match that 8gb and provide typical Google upload and download speeds, I would swap. Dropbox is too slow at time.
As for privacy: what the fucking hell are you lot storing of free sites like this? Just stick MP3s, AVIs, MKVs, and MP4s on there. If you must store documents, encrypt.
And that almost sounds like preaching to the choir. Something no one on here should be doing.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
For pics and videos you have Google+/Picasa web albums and with G+ it's near unlimited space for normal size things. For documents there's Google Docs, as mentioned. What else do you need? Are they going to unify this into a single space or create a Carbonite type backup system? It seems like they already have a "Google Drive", it's just slightly broken up into separate services that enhance the features of the content.
I welcome it, just wonder about usage. I have a SkyDrive acct with 25GB free that I hardly use. Perhaps this is more oriented towards their Google Apps business accounts.
GoogleFS on top of FUSE in Linux has allowed mounting the space that you store Google docs in for quite some time. This whole time I kept wondering, "why isn't anyone writing a GUI for this for Windows and Mac users" so they're not left out in the cold. (Not entirely true with Mac users as FUSE works there too)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I imagine it's because that writing a file system driver is extremely complicated in Windows. Last time I looked there wasn't even a good solution for reading EXT2 formatted drives (though one may exist now). I'm not sure if there are technological limitations in Windows for writing file system drivers, but it seems that their must be, simply by the lack of any. The solutions i've seen for reading and writing to other formats seem to all be utilities that read the raw data, and don't allow you to actually just mount the drive as you would with FAT32 and NTFS.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Google has a habit of killing services it doesn't believe in. That's (moderately) ok for a service like Wave, or even Google Health. It's not so good for a cloud storage service, where long-term availability is very much a requirement.
Mozilla weave (sync) is the only example I can think of, of this "cloud shit" done right. ... crypto done right, and yet "it just works".
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Developer/Crypto
...the only thing i still use is search and I'm slowly moving away from that.
Unless there is some decent, native, client-side encryption/decryption scheme, I'm not going to touch this. Google can promise to "do no evil" all they want, but I'm not giving them an opportunity to index and analyze my personal documents for whatever reason. That said, I would LOVE to find a good, free/cheap cloud hosting service with client-side encryption that has a good interface. SpiderOak is the best I've seen so far, but their Android app is absolutely useless.
Cyberduck, http://cyberduck.ch/, is a stellar FTP client that allows you to mount Google Docs, oh and its open source
Wouldn't it be cool if Google Drive launched on April 1st with an announcement of 1000GB of free online storage? Google can pull this off.
Google got so much respect (and many users) for taking it to the next level with GMail and not just doing another me-too with its email service.
I'll have to admit that Google sometimes seems to have good ideas but they lack that final step to make them great services. Case in point the different ways one can upload information to Google's current services but the lack of some "unified" cloud storage. However, I don't blame them one bit with as acrimonious as copyright holding groups have become with online storage.
I'm sure that the total features, like sharing for example, will be lacking to say the best. There again, I would have to question anyone who solely believes it to be a simple oversight on Google's part. The Megaupload shutdown is still pretty fresh in people's mind and a lot of legitimate users loss a lot of data due to "collateral damage." Trust is not easily won back by the general consumer and the United States government has burned a lot of people as far as online storage goes. That's not to say that people won't come back, just that a lot of people are going to be looking at what happens when three to seven percent of the user base starts using the service for illegal means and causes everyone to loose data?
A lot of people say that we should encrypt our files in the cloud, but let's face it. Not every user is going to be doing this. It has been shown that it won't matter if your files are encrypted or not. If other people are using the site for illegal purposes, your stuff, encrypted or not, is gone with no recourse. That's going to put a lot of pressure on Google to do something about it. Who knows what rules will be in place on a Google cloud drive, if they happen to open one. However, if Google does, the rules are definitely going to include language that is there as a direct result of the Megaupload shutdown.
The sad thing about it all, is that no matter what protections put into place, copyright holders are so venomous that they will punch holes in anyone's case. At some point these groups are going to find loopholes in Google's ToS and system protections. It will be on these faults they will seek to hang Google out to dry. Because, that's what they do, they tear down any new model that poses a threat to their model. It's economic Darwinism and it prevents new and innovative ideas from ever coming to market. That's what several online companies are bitching about and they cannot seem to get politicians or the general public to understand that, without resorting to large grandiose schemes that run the risk of numbing people to the issue. Eventually the public is going to have the mindset of, "Oh, look Wikipedia is protesting something else today...yawn."
There is a severe lack of laws that define the rights entitled to users of the Internet. It was akin to the Wild, Wild West in the early days, but the continued lack of laws have allowed bullies and outlaws to form, with companies that just want to get shit done caught in the middle. We literally have people who come in and extort others just like bandits come to the small town and take all the food! On the opposite side you have those who give them the middle finger and do whatever they can do simply because it is illegal. The best part is that as this goes on, the legislative branch just tosses the issue to the courts to decide (sans any kind of guidance from said former branch.) If this was happening in real life and not on the Internet, there would not be a dry up of ideas in the movie and book industry! They could just do documentaries and biographies and the shit would be better than anything Michael Bay could come up with.
So yeah, just gently scratching the surface and there comes a butt load of reason's for Google to not do a cloud drive, or to cripple it beyond belief. Reasonable laws are needed for the Internet and that's not going to come from politicians or companies, that can only come from the users of the Internet that use this resource everyday in their lives. There again, that's the group of people that's going to be the hardest to convince something is needed and to have them see the point through
And given Google's privacy policies, encryption is clearly well justified.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Try Ext2Fsd - http://www.ext2fsd.com/ - I've been using it to read/write my ext3 volumes in Windows for years. It works just fine in 64-bit Windows 7, too. (Though it doesn't have journaling support, so it effectively writes both ext2 and ext3 volumes as ext2. But this doesn't corrupt the drive.) Since I dual-boot to Linux most of the time, the FS gets checked every couple of weeks just in case. I've never had a problem with it.
This is more about unifying Google Documents, Google Cloud Connect, Microsoft Office and Chromebooks.
If this product makes no money, it will still free people from their desktops and introduce the opportunity to be truly cloud based.
Then mount EncFS on top of that and you have encryption, too. Windows has even more to do to catch up.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
but for some reason it has never offered a unified Google Drive
Google doesn't want to suffer the fate of Megaupload.
Never mind all your fears about Google checking out the files you upload, they'll probably discontinue this new "Google Drive" service in a few months, like almost all of their other services.
This is a step in some direction but is it the right one? Decentralization of data could result in no more need to carry around traditional, clunky laptops and beyond some small stationary drive, that hard drive could conceivably be done away with all together theoretically. Unfortunately, the U.S.'s internet system is far behind that of countries like Japan and there are many places where one doesn't have free wifi or even paid wifi, meaning having a off-site hard drive would result in you not being able to access your data in many areas. --and realistically, for work or play, without a hard drive to store games or many documents, what can you really get done?
If this could be used as simply a supplementary drive, what makes this different from MegaUpload, DropBox or the like? If this was offered as a free service, it could certainly be used that way -- even if a login and password are required to access a drive.
Unfortunately, if it's a paid service, I don't see what they're trying to accomplish here. There are already many services out there and though Google has been very successful with their search engine and even their e-mail service, not many other applications of theirs have taken off. This could be because Google has a long track record of trying to reinvent the wheel. Other map services predated Google Maps and though Google Maps is great, it isn't revolutionary and hasn't redefined online maps the way their search engine has changed search services. Offering e-mail is old and tired -- Lycos, Yahoo, Microsoft...many, many others have done that and it's not much of a stretch to say it's been done to death. Then attempting to create their own social network... I feel like as a company, Google's attempt to almost play it safe by not trying to invent new services is proving to cause them to fail.
That being said, I'd rather see them trying something genuinely new in the future as opposed to offering a service that already exists...
Didn't Slashdot recently run a story on this very offering by European companies?
Such a reaction was predictable and understandable. Now we all get to wait and see how the loss of hosting profits for US companies compares to the gains for media companies. (And by profits, I mean lost business revenue along with increased costs.)
Remember too, that customers of outsourcing services may now have more reason to select specifically non-US businesses.
What might be the prop sects of someone writing a firefox plugin to raid together 100 google accounts? that would make it usable in size and also prevent google from mining your data. I wonder how the latency would be. One could go raid10 for better stability I suppose.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm confused ... isn't Google Docs already this?
I'm already using it this way, using it as an arbitrary file store, from my desktop via the browser and on my iOS devices via multiple applications like "GoodReader".
The article didn't give me an idea of what they're adding. Transparent background sync with local filesystem? Standards-compliant WebDAV access?
The bigger question is when will Google release their own version of Amazon's EC2.
Did not see that. LoL
-- no sig today
Really ? This is like the 42nd time I hear this news...
I'm surprised that no one mentions a service like Amazon S3 for cloud storage - much more free space (at least, for a year), and very low data storage costs thereafter. It is much cheaper than Dropbox, and has a great tools for Linux, Windows and Android. (While Dropbox does too, their free version just gives 2 GB). MS has horrible Android support - but the 25GB is nice.
Not a shill for Amazon, just a recent convert who likes what he found.
I know that I use Gmail Drive to store all my data in the "cloud".
http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
It's great because you can encrypt the data and download it on demand.
Onsite Offsite doesn't matter.
Oh hey, Look it's 7.5 Gigs too.
For all those users that just can't get the hang of something simple like FTP - this is just one more point of confusion where you'll have to install the plugins office-wide for 4 different online apps, and then DO IT FOR THEM because they won't be able to figure out the interface.
or /gdrive or both ?
Actually gmailfs and gmail drive have been around for ages and will likely remain easier to use.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The problem with many services like this is the free users which possibly can compromise the services ( warez and more). Large enterprises with any sense of security and governance is not going to sign up. For Google, this is not an issue as they will make money from all the small accounts, but for box.net, DropBox and more, an increasing issue as filesharing and consumarization does not work! This is why they all try to move up the value chain where www.thruinc.com has been since 2002, why?
managed firewalls, load balancers, handful has physical access to servers ( BIO access monitoring, camera and more)
SSAE 16 and ISAE 3402 previously SAS70 II
SOC 3 SysTrust®
ISO 27001
MS Gold Certified
IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS): 7/24 global monitoring and threat management of all firewalls
QualysGuard IT Security: Weekly Web Application Vulnerability Scanning &Weekly port scanning
NTA Monitor: Comprehensive security testing, external hacking, encryption and secure
handling of client data
Janco Associates, Inc.: Web application security penetration testing
Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity and Infrastructure Policies, Procedures & Planning
just some highlights
it now requires me to have a specific USB drive on me when I need to get a file.
And ATMs require you to have a specific card on you when you need to get some cash. And your house requires you to have a specific key on you when you need to get in the door.
There is Dokan, a japanese library that is similar to FUSE but works on Windows. it comes with a GUI assisted sshfs implementation which does work but is a bit slow. so writing a GoogleFS on top of it could be done.
If google could get an arrangement working with the Gdrive driver to emulate the behavior of long distance iSCSI mounts with a ZFS style local write/read cache, they would own everyone. Because lets face it, fuck file based services, dedup can be done at the block level too folks WITHOUT peeking at your files.