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Google Drive Launching Next Week With 5GB Free Space
An anonymous reader writes "The Next Web is reporting that Google Drive, the search giant's long anticipated cloud storage service, is set to launch next week. From the article: 'What's interesting though is that Google is planning to start everyone with 5 GB of storage. Of course you can buy more, but that trumps Dropbox's 2 GB that is included with every account. Dropbox does make it easy to get more space, including 23 GB of potential upgrades for HTC users. What's also interesting is the wording related to how the system will work. It's been long-thought that Windows integration will come easy, but that getting the Google Drive icon into the Mac a la Dropbox would be a bit harder. From what we're reading, Google Drive will work "in desktop folders" on both Mac and Windows machines, which still leaves the operation question unanswered.'"
Why not try the free "hubic" service by OVH. 25GB free.
I use it to backup my linux box (over webdav).
Google already collects a huge amount of data on people with its search engine, Youtube (tracking what you watch), Gmail, Maps, Android OS and other services. Now they also want you to store important data on a Google Cloud-Drive? What happens when Google is served with a legal warrant stating that government has a right to access everything of yours that is on Google's servers? Its pretty stunning how much data of yours would become transparent at once: What you search for. What you write in emails. What you watch on Youtube. What you do with your Android tablet. And now also the data you store on Google's cloud-drive... Perhaps this is all by design? You are supposed to trust the Google brand with all your private data, until the day the government comes along, and demands to see years worth of your data, and - crucially - without you even knowing this is happening. For me, Google Cloud-drive is simply too many eggs in one basket. Sure, it could be useful for backing up some not terribly critical data, and then accessing that data from all sorts of different places when you are on the go. My gutfeeling tells me though that Google already knows more than enough about everyone, and that adding your non-internet data to its data collection is a step too far - too far in the wrong direction.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
The attraction of cloud storage for end users is integration with other services - think iCloud. Google already has cloud storage for music, which is pretty neat because you can stream directly from it on any Android device (and optionally precache some files locally, while still having auto-sync etc). They also have a separate cloud storage for photos - PicasaWeb - also integrated with Android gallery, as well as G+. Then there are Google Docs. Perhaps they figured that it's long overdue for them to aggregate all those services together in a single solution, like Apple did with iCloud.
Will Google have native clients for Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, Android and Symbian that will offer real file system integration?
Or is that just a web drive you have to up- and download data from?
I'm asking because I'm using Dropbox in a business environment in which I export a Samba share from a Linux server to Dropbox which gets synced to a bunch of clients on half a dozen of very different devices running on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android and iOS and all of this works just fine. Having 5 GB instead of 2 GB for free is not much of an advantage if there is no system integration to speak of and exactly this has always been a problem with Google. Hey, they even have a hard time to get IMAP right.
You may think that nobody is using it, but it is actually quite widespread service. Of course, Microsoft also offers it for Office and other business users with actual SLA, unlike Google.
SkyDrive will also be directly integrated into Windows 8, which will most likely bring them millions of users. Hell, even Apple uses Microsoft's cloud offerings, albeit that is Microsoft Azure as they need programming access too.
Yeah, and for the same reasons their e-mail service never caught on.
Speaking of Gmail, currently it says I have 7.7 GB of free storage there. Can't they at least match this with their new Cloud drive? I already use Gmail for temporary storage all the time - just attach files to draft emails and I can access them from anywhere.
Speaking of Picasa, I'm disappointed with Google's support for Linux lately. For a company that actively shuns Windows for its own users, they seem to be lacking in support for it these days. The latest versions of Picasa have dropped support for Linux ... it'll be interesting to see if this has a Linux client, or even better, and open API.
Yes, Picasa and Google Earth use Wine. You can actually get the latest versions working manually, but it would be nice to see a little support given how much they rely on Linux. They do have a Google chat client, which is nice.
Seems to me Google would be much further ahead having an actual Google-branded Linux distro available along-side their Chrome downloads for people still on XP. This is the optimal time for them, before MS starts trying to lock down bootloaders.
And I can't but a terabyte and a half of cloud storage from a reputable place at a reasonable price... yet
I know where you can get about 500 GB for no monthly fee. You just need an always-on server (preferably running *nix) and network connection, and be willing to "trade" storage, storing about 1 TB of other peoples' files (all data is automatically encrypted before upload), using the Tahoe LAFS distributed storage grid. Actually, if you get your own group together you can get as much space as you want, but the grid I'm a member (currently) has a 1 TB maximum. The storage nodes are scattered across several continents and Tahoe applies Reed-Solomon coding to your data so even if many of the servers holding your data were to disappear, you could stil recover all of it.
If this is interesting, check out our wiki at: http://bigpig.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I was doing truecrypt but didn't like the extra steps to open a file, dump stuff in, etc. I gave boxcryptor http://www.boxcryptor.com/ a whirl and have been very happy with it. It adds on right to dropbox. It's free (up to 2 gig of encryption) and a one time fee for unlimited. I tried spider oak too but didn't like how it all worked and I'm not a fan of re-occuring costs.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
I wouldn't be surprised. As it is, I pay Google for storage that's shared across all of their services. Picasa, Docs, Gmail, etc. all share the one 20GB I pay Google for at $5/yr.
Their current pricing for storage, in addition to the free storage quota:
20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)
400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)
1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)
2 TB ($512.00 USD per year)
4 TB ($1,024.00 USD per year)
8 TB ($2,048.00 USD per year)
16 TB ($4,096.00 USD per year)