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.'"

Comments

Google Drive

[StevenBielberg]

There are two large, very real problems with Google Drive. For starters Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them. This would be a huge problem with cloud storage like Google Drive.

I also fail to see why this would get any good amount of users even if Google did advertise it correctly - unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new. There are tons of companies offering their services with ridiculously low profit margins. Hell, most of them are free for home users, and I really wouldn't trust Google with my company or work data - I would use a professional hosting service with SLA and company that has no need to mine my data.

Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid. They already know so much - hell, they track Slashdot too. On top of that Google has serious problem with anti-competition regulators and this is just going to make those issues worse when Dropbox and other companies will demand Google to stop leveraging their search engine against them. They already have this problem in other markets.

Re:Google Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

>> unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new.

Because email was a new phenomenon when Gmail launched?

Re:Google Drive

[fph il quozientatore]

I also fail to see why this would get any good amount of users even if Google did advertise it correctly - unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new. There are tons of companies offering their services with ridiculously low profit margins. Hell, most of them are free for home users, and I really wouldn't trust Google with my company or work data [...] Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid. They

Yeah, and for the same reasons their e-mail service never caught on.

Re:Google Drive

[pushing-robot]

It's probably targeting Apple's iCloud. It's nice to be able to tell developers "Here's a place to store data. It will automatically be backed up and synchronized between the user's devices. You won't have to run your own servers and get the user to trust you with their data. You won't even have to ask the user for special credentials or get them to sign up for Dropbox or anything like that. It just works."

Re:Google Drive

[StevenBielberg]

Gmail was done remarkably better and offered much larger storage than their competitors. Yet, Gmail still didn't win Hotmail or Yahoo which to date are the two largest email providers on planet.

However, it doesn't seem like this is the case with Google Drive. It actually looks like they don't bring anything new or innovative to the table either, and in fact, might have a worse service than Dropbox and other companies have (not even having good software for OS X or Linux). They also don't offer that much more space either.

The cloud storage landscape and internet in 2012 is vastly different from email and Gmail when it launched.

Re:Google Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

It just works if the customer in question already has a Gdrive account.

Re:Google Drive

[pushing-robot]

I'd imagine Google Drive would be tied to Google accounts, and it's safe to assume most Android users will have Google accounts.

Re:Google Drive

[larry bagina]

Google isn't a charity. Giving away free storage doesn't make money in and of itself. Will they charge for more space? Show ads? Read your docs and blackmail you?

(And yes, the same point is true for dropbox et alia).

Re:Google Drive

[icebraining]

Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid.

The advantage of a dumb data store is that you can layer some encryption transparently. Even something simple like putting a password on a RAR file is enough to prevent such snooping.

That said, I probably wouldn't use it for anything important anyway.

Re:Google Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Email is not storage. Users don't want a new email address. That's why hotmail and yahoo still exist at all.

Re:Google Drive

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:Google Drive

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them...
Or simply deciding to allocate resources elsewhere when ( Squirrel! ) some other technology looks more interesting to some 20-something with the title of "Manager"

Re:Google Drive

[steelfood]

Truecrypt. It's not completely secure since they probably have copies of your container elsewhere they can use to do a bitwise comparison against. But it's more work for them to decrypt than plaintext, and practically necessitates a determined attacker.

Assuming they don't already securely encrypt your data during transit and in storage.

Re:Google Drive

[StevenBielberg]

Since Google Music was just recently launched, why didn't they do it with Google Drive to begin with? Same is true for Picasa, or now Google+. Seems they are just separating their services. On top of that Google sucks at building brand names which is also visible from their use of subdomains for different products. drive.google.com looks a lot more serious than something like dropbox.com. They would probably have youtube under youtube.google.com if it wasn't for the fact that they bought the whole website from other company and it had already built it's name by then.

Re:Google Drive

[DragonWriter]

There are two large, very real problems with Google Drive. For starters Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them. This would be a huge problem with cloud storage like Google Drive.

Insofar as that is true, that history includes doing so with a long warning before cutting off access and with quite good support for outbound migration, so I don't see why it would be much of a rational concern. Further, the kind of cloud storage user interface being provided is a pretty trivial layer on top of the cloud storage backend that underlies many other Google services that its a pretty low risk of it being discontinued.

I also fail to see why this would get any good amount of users even if Google did advertise it correctly - unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new.

Neither web search engines, web-based email, or web-based video hosting were anything new when Google's search engine, Gmail, or YouTube (which wasn't Google's when it was introduced) were introduced. Nevertheless, each managed to do quite well.

Free-to-start, generous quota, and zero-effort (or close to it) signup if you already have a Google Account, by themselves, will get them some users. Actually having some interesting distinguishing features compared to other cloud storage providers would obviously be important to getting substantially more users. The most obvious opportunity I see for Google here is integration with Google Docs.

Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid.

How?

They already know so much - hell, they track Slashdot too.

Tracking slashdot may be evidence of inefficient use of resources, but its hardly an argument in support of "they know too much!" scaremongering.

On top of that Google has serious problem with anti-competition regulators and this is just going to make those issues worse when Dropbox and other companies will demand Google to stop leveraging their search engine against them.

Well, it might cause problems in that regard, if there was evidence that Google was illegally leveraging anything against competitors in the cloud storage space. Then again, as I discuss below, it probably wouldn't even then.

They already have this problem in other markets.

Winning in two different markets to the extent where established players in one feel that its worth their effort to complain that you are leveraging your market position in one to dominate the other is the exact opposite of a "problem" for the firm that is in that position.

It might lead to a problem if you actually were doing something that was likely to produce a signficant restraining action from some government, but as many other firms have demonstrated (notably Microsoft in the software market), even actually illegally leveraging a monopoly in one market to monopolize another rarely results in any remedy that is either timely enough to make any substantial impact on the utility of the action, or significant enough to outweigh the benefits you gain from doing it.

Re:Google Drive

[Missing.Matter]

You must be pretty young to not remember a time when someone might have had to actually delete messages before they received new ones because they ran out of storage in their inbox. We're talking services that offered like 2mb for storage. Then Google came around and offered an entire gigabyte, promising to never have to worry about your inbox capacity again. This absolutely caused many people to switch to gmail. When hotmail and others realized this, they followed suit and started upping their mailbox capacity to match gmail's.

Re:Google Drive

[StevenBielberg]

Email definitely is storage. You don't want to keep deleting your emails all the time. You most likely also want to search through your old emails. With other free services of the time you would have to keep deleting them constantly as otherwise the message box got full and you didn't get new emails.

Re:Google Drive

[Korin43]

There are two large, very real problems with Google Drive. For starters Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them. This would be a huge problem with cloud storage like Google Drive.

They do tend to give you quite a bit of notice though. It may be a hassle, but it's not like it's impossible to download your stuff and upload it somewhere else.

Re:Google Drive

[Missing.Matter]

Gmail offered 1gb of mail storage per user while the competition offered something like 2mb. For Google Drive to be equally impressive, I'd expect them to offer 1.25tb of cloud storage per user. :P

Re:Google Drive

[shutdown -p now]

Since Google Music was just recently launched, why didn't they do it with Google Drive to begin with? Same is true for Picasa, or now Google+. Seems they are just separating their services.

Picasa is not recent - it has been there for years (G+ integration is what's recent).

I don't know about Google Music, though. Maybe it is actually built on top of GDrive?

Re:Google Drive

[StevenBielberg]

In fact even Microsoft's offering, SkyDrive, is currently offering 25GB for free. Google is seriously lagging behind in this.

Re:Google Drive

[PopeRatzo]

There are two large, very real problems with Google Drive. For starters Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them. This would be a huge problem with cloud storage like Google Drive.

How would it be a "huge problem" if Google should abandon this cloud-storage? It's only 5gig, after all, and they give away 4gig flash drives in boxes of cereal (practically).

The only reason I'd use it is to allow me to access files from anywhere, the way I use dropbox now. I would never use either service as a backup system. Hell, I won't use ANY cloud-based backup system. It's pretty easy to create your own ubiquitous storage anyway, flash memory being so cheap.

Re:Google Drive

[Charliemopps]

I don't necessarily disagree with your arguments but I'd like to offer arguments to each:

1. Googles target audience is not the corporate user. It's people at home that want to backup photos and such. These people will probobly have a google account, a dropbox account, etc... etc.. The more places you can backup your data the better. If Google drops the product, oh well.

2. I don' think this needs a "Good amount of users" Much like microsoft, Google wants to offer you every option. They don't want to force you to use another companies product simply because they don't offer a "google version" The biggest threat that Google would ever face would be a company offering something they do not, and then that something becoming ubiquitous enough that the rival company could offer the same service that Google does and kill off their business (see facebook)

3. Google, like every other corporation on earth, doesn't give a shit about anti-competition regulation. They can, just like Apple, Microsoft, and everyone else, just ignore it... then, when sued, draw out the court battle so long that the companies in question will die long before any litigation is resolved. Even if they do not, the fines levied are almost always so small they are a joke. If I get a speeding ticket, the fine is about 3 days pay for me. How about when a buisness gets a fine they get a similar fine... 3days gross income. Well, that's another topic.

Re:Google Drive

[vaccum pony]

I already use Gmail as a dumb (limited) data store. With encryption.

Re:Google Drive

[dehole]

Exactly. With Google Drive, you and your data is the product.

Re:Google Drive

[Missing.Matter]

I know, I found it interesting that TFA doesn't mention this. As a live account user, I don't see this big deal of this announcement.

Re:Google Drive

[Lumpy]

"Yet, Gmail still didn't win Hotmail or Yahoo which to date are the two largest email providers on planet."
Yet, Yahoo and Hotmail still didn't win AOL users which to date still has a huge number of users.

Yes, they do. It makes most tech people weep, but I meet someone in business weekly that has a @AOL address.

Re:Google Drive

[Galestar]

You missed the point. To change storage providers you don't have to make sure 100 different websites use your new "address" - like an email address or a phone number.

Re:Google Drive

[StevenBielberg]

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.

Re:Google Drive

[hairyfeet]

I'd say the first of those two is the big "Uh oh" with Google drive, after all you could always encrypt your stuff before you sent it. But as we have seen with Google its either a megahit or its dead, there really is no in between with that company so i would be seriously leery of wanting to store my stuff with them until I saw whether or not its gonna last.

Of course all of these cloud storage bunches that aren't targeting businesses is gonna end up screwed anyway as it looks like the ISPs are just gonna cap the ever loving shit out of anything they aren't getting a cut of.....err i mean "hosting in their local datacenter" so unless they are gonna set up a branch on every local ISP this whole "in the cloud" thing will come screeching to a halt the first time someone gets that insane bill for going over their caps. i know in my area its $1.50 a Gb if you go over so its much cheaper just to slap everything on a USB drive and cart it offsite than it is to deal with the overcharges.

Re:Google Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not blind hatred, we've just been used to better for a few years already :) How much does all the BS pay, though?

Re:Google Drive

[demonbug]

I also fail to see why this would get any good amount of users even if Google did advertise it correctly - unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new. There are tons of companies offering their services with ridiculously low profit margins. Hell, most of them are free for home users, and I really wouldn't trust Google with my company or work data [...] Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid. They

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.

Re:Google Drive

[StevenBielberg]

Can you tell me more about the amazing Microsoft SharePoint, which I can use in conjunction with fantastic business tools like Microsoft Great Plains to increase my productivity and my profitability?

No, but you can Bing for that!

Re:Google Drive

[ColdWetDog]

I use Dropbox as a backup system - part of a rational, multi component program. The Dropbox data is on every machine I have the account on (three currently), so that's different local stores - one at home, one at work, one in my backpack, one in the cloud. Personal info is encrypted in sparseimages - I could use truecrypt as well if I really wanted a multi platform solution.

It doesn't backup everything - my terabyte collection of pictures and video is backed up locally using a NAS and external drives - but Dropbox is hella convenient for some data. And pretty safe. If Dropbox went belly up tomorrow, I would be missing just one out of three copies of the data.

Re:Google Drive

[DragonWriter]

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.

Well, Google doesn't offer Google Drive at all yet. I don't know what the basis is for assuming that when they do, they won't offer it to to paid users with an SLA as they already do for similar services (notably including the Cloud Storage API.)

SkyDrive will also be directly integrated into Windows 8, which will most likely bring them millions of users.

Yeah, if only Google had a widely used consumer operating system with which they could bundle Google Drive.

Re:Google Drive

[Nerdfest]

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.

Re:Google Drive

[DragonWriter]

I don't know about Google Music, though. Maybe it is actually built on top of GDrive?

Its more likely that Google Music and the forthcoming Drive are built on the same low-level cloud storage layer that underlies many of Google's cloud offerings -- like Docs, the Cloud Storage API, and many others.

Its unlikely that Music or any of the others are built on Drive.

Re:Google Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

As a live account user

I LOL'd.

Re:Google Drive

[AngryDeuce]

Yeah, it would be out of character for Google not to at least offer this to existing Google account holders, unless they're going to do it invite only initially to slow down adoption like they did with Google Music.

Re:Google Drive

[interkin3tic]

Serious problems with anti-competitive regulators, or serious problems from a lot of sore losers whining through their lobbyists and media? I have yet to hear a good explanation for how google is being anti-competitive. Mail, search, maps, adsense... I can't think of a single thing they do that there isn't healthy competition going on.

The closest thing I've heard is whining about how they won't release their methods for ranking pages, and the only people that seem to be whining about that are SEOs who want to spam it, breaking google search for everyone else.

putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid. They already know so much - hell, they track Slashdot too.

Not a very good example there: I don't really write anything I intend to keep private on slashdot.

Re:Google Drive

[shutdown -p now]

Google support for Linux for their native client apps was always lackluster - didn't they actually use WineLib for Picasa? And they never had a GTalk client, either.

As far as protocols go, I'd fully expect it to be documented at the very least, and most likely it'll be something industry-standard like WebDAV. On the other hand, they didn't document GMusic (though, being a simple web service, it was promptly reverse-engineered, and there are several third-party apps supporting it now).

Re:Google Drive

[Missing.Matter]

With the plethora of forwarding and mailbox combining options available, even in 2003, switching mail providers is pretty seamless. This is in stark contrast to changing your phone number and bank.

Re:Google Drive

[Nerdfest]

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.

Re:Google Drive

[Urza9814]

My Gmail account is currently using 2.5 GIGS. Before Gmail existed, the largest mailbox capacity that existed (as far as I know) was Fastmail, with 10 megs, with 1-2mb being common (hotmail, yahoo, aol, etc). I would generally overflow those in 6 months to a year. Granted, a lot of my gmail emails I could do without. Others -- hell, I still have attachments of hundreds of kilobytes, sometimes even megabytes, from five years ago that I pull up occasionally. For me at least, Gmail's storage capacity revolutionized email. 'email it to yourself' or even 'email it to me' was not a feasible way to transfer or store files until Gmail (Gmail was also the first, and still one of the few, providers to allow large attachments. Most providers still limit it to 10 megs, while Gmail is 20. Your guess is as good as mine as to what the limit was with a 2 meg inbox.) The search helps a lot too, though that's obviously related -- no need for search it if you can't store it. I'm a lot more likely to remember that I got a PDF of that two semesters ago from Ms. xyz than I am to remember where the hell I stored that file. Plus I've gone through four or five computers since getting Gmail, so files that I can currently just grab out of my email would have otherwise been scattered across six or seven hard drives.

Yes, users don't want a new email address. That's why I love gmail. In the two years before gmail launched the situation with email storage was really getting to be a problem, due to increasing internet speed and file sizes. I think I went through four email accounts in those two years. Some of that was due to storage, some due to spam (When gmail launched there was no comparison with the spam filters. They're still among the best. Went from a dozen or so spams a day to less than one a month) So...I went from changing addresses every six months to having the same address for about eight years now. The desire to keep one constant email address is exactly why Gmail was so popular. Maybe not for people like my father, who's STILL on hotmail, but for people who use email heavily that was certainly a large part of the motivation.

Re:Google Drive

[HJED]

No one is using it because Dropbox has better cross platform support and offline storage.

Re:Google Drive

[flappinbooger]

Yeah, and for the same reasons their e-mail service never caught on.

Or their calendar, their docs, their OS, their phones, or their social med... nevermind, got carried away there.

Re:Google Drive

[errandum]

You fail to consider that this service might have something different. Most google services did not innovate, search was already there, e-mail was already there, even calendars were already there. And then google gave you more value for free (or for data). Some might dislike that, I know I don't...

5gb is already a step in the right direction. But I'm thinking that integration with other google services (for example, douments -> docs, files to e-mail in an instant, etc).

If you have sensitive files, this service is not directed at you (:

Re:Google Drive

[darkmeridian]

I use TrueCrypt on my Dropbox to make a secure volume that I just drop my stuff into. It's annoying to have to log in and stuff but it's still worth it for the added security.

Re:Google Drive

[darkmeridian]

Yeah, I use Google Apps (don't knock it--good business-class SLA that secures my data, Device Management, etc.) and Google Connect syncs all of my documents onto Google Docs transparently from Microsoft Word. Imagine just saving all my files on there directly. Hmmmm..... Even more points if it saves versioning. That would make me not use Microsoft SharePoint.

Re:Google Drive

[arth1]

I think it could be a useful backup for /dev/random
Right now I use an USB key for that (no, really, I do), but it would be nice to have a larger entropy pool I can read from anywhere. If it didn't require a Google account and accepting tracking cookies in my browser, that is.

Of course, if everybody used it for this, Google would probably close the service, as compression and dedup would end up consuming extra space instead of saving space.

Re:Google Drive

[drkstr1]

How did you type all that in under a minute? You must be the fastest typer EVER!

Re:Google Drive

[Sporkinum]

I don't trust Google, so I only use it as a spam catcher and for work voicemail transcribed.
Using 159 MB of your 7701 MB

I wouldn't trust them for storage as well, unless I encrypted everything before storing it.

I am still using my same ISP for email for the last 11 years. If my imap gets full, I down load and archive it locally.

Re:Google Drive

[djhertz]

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.

Re:Google Drive

[CohibaVancouver]

Nobody is using skydrive

I like SkyDrive, but the max file size (50 megs IIRC?) means that for me it's dead in the water. I realize MS is concerned about people using it to trade pirated movies and music, but it also means the service is pretty useless. If I can't even send my parents a video of their granddaughter playing in the park, or singing happy birthday, what's the point?

Re:Google Drive

[StevenBielberg]

Google has never really cared about Linux. They use it when it suits them - on their servers (and they don't open most of the code) and on Android, because that is what the company that initially developed Android used and it suits them. Linux, for Google, is basically just a cheap way to get stuff done where they would otherwise have to spend lots of money and effort. They don't really care about the ideology behind it.

Re:Google Drive

[jockm]

Its almost like you are saying Google is a business or something. Anything you don't run an manage yourself can disappear at any time*. It's about calculated risk. If the service is useful, then I will use it. I never use any kind of cloud storage to keep data I don't back up elsewhere, and neither should you.

But if you aren't going to use something because it might go away, well that just about describes everything. I am glad Google is getting more focused, trying things and then getting rid of them if they don't work out. This way they have more resources to keep trying new things.

*: And things that you do manage 100% yourself are probably about as (or more) likely to go away, in my experience.

Re:Google Drive

[elashish14]

Wow, that's really smart of them, imposing a limit on file size to stop piracy. Cause nobody's gonna try splitting their files to get around that limit, nor would they even imagine using encryption to hide the contents of the files.

That is about as useful as DRM. Sucks for the people who use the service legitimately, easily bypassed for those who want to circumvent it anyways.

Re:Google Drive

[justforgetme]

teach you subtly = teach you in a subtle way
teach you subtlety = teach you the ways of being subtle

</pedant></grammar_Nazi></offtopic>

Re:Google Drive

[justforgetme]

Welcome to the modern world! You are a criminal here but we won't accuse you of it in the face or let you prove otherwise!

Re:Google Drive

[justforgetme]

Ohh, there are enough """web developers""" out there that just throw them in there as attachments...

Re:Google Drive

[SomePgmr]

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)

Re:Google Drive

[drkstr1]

Thank you. I will commit this one to memory.

Re:Google Drive

[freedumb2000]

Whatever the reason for the 50Mb limit, especially pirates know how to use split RARs. With that kind of limit, you can't share high res PSDs, 3D renderings or anything else where a 25Gb online storage space actually makes sense. And actually, it sounds perfect for sharing music, even FLAC are less than 50Mb per track.

Re:Google Drive

[Richard_at_work]

Have to disagree, VS is head and shoulders above Eclipse in both niceness of use and ability. I've used Eclipse for a 4 month stretch and I really really despise it. VS is significantly better.

Re:Google Drive

[repvik]

It's "pretty seamless" when you're technically inclined. Those users I know with Hotmail-adresses are not.

Re:Google Drive

[Macfox]

Tell that to the 3+ million business that already use Google Apps which does have an SLA.

Re:Google Drive

[repvik]

Do you think Google will yank the service without providing people ample warning? It's storage. It's most likely pretty darn easy to download your files and upload them somewhere else.

Re:Google Drive

[hpoul]

the only people who don't attach them are people who want to track the views of their newsletter, so it makes sense that gmail, thunderbird, etc. won't show external images by default.. if you send a big email, include it in total, why only include half of the message.. you could just have sent a link to your website if you don't want to use email in the first place..
or, simply send out small emails without 5 MB worth of images..

Re:Google Drive

[asdf7890]

There are two large, very real problems with Google Drive. For starters Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them. This would be a huge problem with cloud storage like Google Drive.

That is a potential problem with all "cloud" based services, not just storage. In fact it is the same protential problem that exists for non-cloud stuff: things can fail.

The trick is to avoid single points of failure. Google presumably have sufficient redundancy, correctly configured, such that everything should survive all but a catastrophic problem - but if high availalability is important to you they are a single point of failure (what do you do if their service is down for a couple of hours, or a full working day?). If you use something like this, just use two or more. Drop box down? Find the files in Google's service, or restore from your local backups if you have sufficient bandwidth.

Using multipe services also protects you from "shutdown surprise". This is less important for storage as it is simpler (Google would give good notice prior to service shutdown, and moving files from one provider to another is going to be relatively painless). But for more complex services (from backups beyond simply "keeping a copy of your files out there" to full app hosting) a shutdown might be a lot more hassle. Using two services, or at least keeping a second in mind so your code is easy to refactor should you need to move, forces you to think in a way that reduces your level of lock-in with a particular service. You don't have to host a full app active on two services simultaneously (this may be a waste of resource unlike with simple storage where keeping two active copies is easy), just make sure you have a migration plan and review (or better: test) that plan after any significant change to the app.

Re:Google Drive

[justforgetme]

You don't need to include all images in order to track views, that job is usually done by an independent asset and things you follow have their external assets allowed usually. If your newsletter is of the spamy type, aka people don't expect to hear from you prior to it's arrival then you probably would like to add the images as attachments since it is unlikely people will see them otherwise but spam was never a use case on my projects.
Email attachments had their uses, now they are pretty much obsolete. Also if part of your email's content is encapsulated in the images and the images are not the reason for the email you are doing it wrong.

HTML emails aka "emails with graphical content done right" have their uses, namely prettyfication of the plain text version of the email.

Re:Google Drive

[TheCarp]

> putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid

Yes it is...however, I feel the same way about every other company, including the ones with the SLA who say they wont ever look at your data. Unless its encrypted on disk and they don't have the key, then I don't trust it...because it means trusting them, trusting courts that may order them to look, trusting every employee they ever hire, trusting anyone who compromises their system, thats a lot of trust.

I see no mention of linux (which is basically all I use at home or work, unless you count booting windows for the exlusive purpose of playing steam games)... but Mac users should be able to use encfs, which I have used in the past with similar services.

These services, even the free ones, are just fine, as long as you take the right precautions. The only files (at all) you will find on any cloud storage of mine are encrypted.

Re:Google Drive

[Inda]

I'll tell you what Google bring to the table:

The name of Google.

I tried to get my family on Dropbox. I even offered to answer all their surveys and upload video data in order to get another 5gb. The family needed a way to send large files and Dropbox, with it's Android integration, was the answer. They couldn't arsed and still burn CDRs for people. We have 50mbit/5mbit in this house. *facepalm*.

Google can offer 5gb from Google with a simple single click from a Google webpage like Google Play.

Re:Google Drive

[modmans2ndcoming]

a long history? It was just this last year that Larry Page decided to kill a bunch of under performing projects. prior to that, Google let things continue to suck resources.

Re:Google Drive

[modmans2ndcoming]

DropBox can decrypt your data. I hope you pre-encrypt anything important.

Re:Google Drive

[AmiMoJo]

Exchange for Windows Server 2003 has a 2GB per mailbox limit, and back when I did support we had a lot of people running into that.

Re:Google Drive

[AmiMoJo]

They have always kept storage for Gmail and other apps separate, e.g. you get 1GB for all your docs and Picasa that doesn't count towards Gmail. Oddly enough when you buy extra storage (at a very reasonable $5/year for 20GB) it counts towards both.

Re:Google Drive

[chowdahhead]

Google Earth does not use wine--I don't recall that ever being the case. Download it for yourself and you'll find native linux binaries and libraries with a Qt UI. In fact, Picassa is the only Google product I know of that relies on wine.

Re:Google Drive

[jones_supa]

He's a subscriber, and those can see the published articles earlier than others.

Re:Google Drive

[V for Vendetta]

In fact even Microsoft's offering, SkyDrive, is currently offering 25GB for free.

I don't have a SkyDriver account (and don't plan to create one just to test it), so I have to resort to other sources of information. Wikipedia mentions that 25GB of storage, but also states that it has an individual file size limit of 100MB. If that's true, that's a) an odd limitation and b) does certainly reduce its use cases.

Re:Google Drive

[datavirtue]

I see no valid arguments in your post.

Re:Google Drive

[datavirtue]

I have a Live account at my college, not by choice, and I rarely use but for .edu verification for free Microsoft software licenses.

[throws invectim]

Re:Google Drive

[datavirtue]

Uh...er...I get contacted by people all the time who use, overwhelmingly, gmail. Mind you, they are using it to establish a dialog with me, not to plug into a form for sign-up. Most of the people I converse with anymore use gmail, which is very surprising to me. Anecdotal, but I once thought as you did. It appears people have embraced gmail. It is a good solid service that is free of the distracting interface presented by yahoo and AOL (hotmail? that is still up?). People can also get a new intelligible email address on gmail, which is a big incentive to switch. my.name@gmail.com or sestra98@aol.com? You be the judge.

Re:Google Drive

[V for Vendetta]

Exchange for Windows Server 2003 has a 2GB per mailbox limit, and back when I did support we had a lot of people running into that.

Exchange 2003 has no such limit. At least the one we're running here. Do you by chance confuse that with Outlook's PST file size limit?

Re:Google Drive

[Petaris]

The pricing for 1TB on is interesting. ;)

It works out to be $1 for 4GB, a decent price but still amusing. :)

Re:Google Drive

[V for Vendetta]

Wuala claims to encrypt your files locally:

All files are directly encrypted on your desktop. Your password never leaves your computer. Not even we as the provider can access your files or your password.

I'm giving it a try at the moment and so far it seems to work. If has both a sync and a backup option. It offers clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android. It's not open source and there currently seems to be no API. It's still in beta, so there's hope an API might eventually be added later on.

If you sign up with this referral, you'll start with 3GB instead of 2GB for the free account.

Disclosure: I'll receive additional 250MB storage space per account creation through that referral, up to a max of 5GB, as you can read here.

Re:Google Drive

[DarthVain]

If only there was some utility that would do all that for you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR

Nothing like putting limitations on accounts that can be defeated by 1993 technology, originally developed to defeat a lack of technology.

Re:Google Drive

[CAIMLAS]

That's kind of absurd, since Apple iCloud has negligible penetration for a marginal user base.

If you're going up anyone, you go up against an innovative market leader. Unfortunately, that means Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.

Most of what iCloud claims to do Google has been doing for quite a few years already (with Android and various connectors for various applications). Google Docs takes care of most of the iCloud requirement, as does the ability to store files within your gmail storage already...

Google is just turning what people are already doing into a tangible and independent service for functional isolation/autonomy.

Re:Google Drive

[Cinder6]

To be fair, they are fixing this in Mountain Lion, but it is baffling that they didn't have iCloud working with OS X from the start.

Re:Google Drive

[Cinder6]

I am really curious: What is the reason for doing this?

Re:Google Drive

[madhi19]

Yeah right because Windows never ever phone home! loll And if you believe that I got some swamp land to sell you.

Re:Google Drive

[arth1]

On systems without a hardware random generator, /dev/random generally only holds a very small pool of random data, and it can take a lot of time to generate even just a small amount when needed. Example, getting just 1 kB of random data:

$ dd if=/dev/random of=foo bs=1 count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1024 bytes (1.0 kB) copied, 188.854 s, 0.0 kB/s

More than 3 minutes for a single kB in this case, on a Core i7 machine. /dev/urandom is much faster, but it's pseudo-random data, and can sometimes fail tests for randomness (like FIPS 140-2), which may prevent the data from being usable in an app.

So pregenerating some big blocks of random data and storing it where you can reach it when needed can be a time saver.

Of course, if you want the random data for cryptography, you probably don't want to store it unencrypted in a cloud, but for other use, it's practical.

Re:Google Drive

[Urza9814]

http://web.archive.org/web/20021202101745/http://mail.yahoo.com/

December 2002 archive of Yahoo's own site states:

Free 4MB storage - up to twice as much as other free email providers!

Around '04 they moved that up to 100 megs to compete with Gmail, then went unlimited some time after that. Are you sure you didn't have a paid 'Yahoo! Mail Plus' account? Those apparently had 25 megs starting in 1999.

Re:Google Drive

[nightfell]

But Google is excessively fickle in this regard. You are thinking far too binary, where something that happens now and then, and something that happens all the fucking time, are treated as equal simply because they both happen.

Re:Google Drive

[swalve]

It's only random the first time you use it.

Re:Google Drive

[Samizdata]

Yeah, with a craptacular 100Mb per file size limit, which means I can't use it to offsite my Gmail backup, even seriously compressed.

Re:Google Drive

[dave87656]

I know two people with Windows Phone 7 and both wouldn't buy it again. One has already moved to Android (Samsung Galaxy II) and the other will probably get an IPhone when his contract is up. YMMV.

As far as .NET is concerned, that's great, if you want it to run only under Windows and I suppose the same is true for Objective-C and IOS. I'm developing a large (1.5 million lines of code) Java project which has to run on Windows and Linux so .NET is not an answer.

Re:Google Drive

[arth1]

It's only random the first time you use it.

Well, yes and no. If it's for distinct and separate purposes, it's fine to re-use, as it's still random.
One can use the same random data to test two different algorithms with, for example. And even should, if collecting performance metrics.
Was it Sperry Rand that published a book of one million random numbers? It was useful back then, even if re-used.

For cryptography or other security related use, or where two programs interact, no, you don't want to re-use the data. Which is why I wrote "several blocks", so you can use and discard.

Given that the standard entropy pool size in Linux is just 256 bytes (0-4096 bits, aiming for 2048), and likely close to zero when anyone has used /dev/random or /dev/urandom, it doesn't hurt to have a key fob with a bunch of pre-generated random blocks.

I'd carry a Simtec Entropykey if it wasn't for it requiring special software to be installed to use it.

Re:Google Drive

[justforgetme]

Hmmm.... I stand corrected. Memory thy are a heartless damsel...

Re:Google Drive

[V for Vendetta]

For whatever reason (my bet's on Google Drive going live), Wuala up'd its storage to 5GB for the free account.

Privacy?

[AmiMoJo]

Even Dropbox do some encryption, less than perfect though it may be... AFAIK Google don't scan your docs for data like they do with emails. How will it work with your private files?

Re:Privacy?

[Calos]

Dropbox has encryption, but Dropbox has all the keys. If you're worried about your privacy from the party offering the service, you can't give Dropbox a pass.

I think Ars ran an article about a service recently which uses better encryption. Or you can just encrypt your own files before uploading, or use TrueCrypt.

Re:Privacy?

[olsmeister]

Put a TrueCrypt partition on the drive. Encryption needs to be done at the ends; they are just providing a bit storage medium.

Re:Privacy?

[Calos]

This is that Ars article.

Re:Privacy?

[StevenBielberg]

If you're worried about your privacy from the party offering the service, you can't give Dropbox a pass.

Like you noted, you use TrueCrypt or similar. This is even a suggested solution by Dropbox team and it's a valid one, because you should never trust third party provider with your encryption.

However, at least Dropbox does more encryption on the data and actually stores it in encrypted form, even if they are able to obtain the keys. This is still vastly better than just using HTTPS or other "secure" connection between the client and server but still saving it unencrypted. On top of that HTTPS etc are subject to secure key forgery and man in the middle attacks like providing self-signed key and snooping the connection (a real problem in many less developed countries).

Re:Privacy?

[AmiMoJo]

Spideroak lets you keep the keys. Truecrypt will work but does come with two big performance hits. First you have to upload the entire container the first time, after which it should just need differences sending. Unfortunately Windows doesn't allow the client software to know which parts of the file changed via notifications, just that something changed, so it has to scan the entire file. If your container is 1GB then that's scanning 1GB every time you make a change.

Re:Privacy?

[Cow Jones]

• If you're looking for privacy, don't store sensitive data in the cloud.
• If you have to, avoid companies which have an obvious interest in your connections, your data, and your profile.
• If you need strong transparent client-side encryption, you can either use a TrueCrypt container (like olsmeister mentioned), or use an alternative provider which offers this feature: for example, SpiderOak or Wuala. Dropbox, as you mentioned is not secure, because they hold your keys.
• Avoid the US and US-based companies for storage of sensitive data. The Patriot Act requires Google to give the DHS access to their servers, even if they are physically located in the EU. Wuala is operated by LaCie, a Swiss company; they guarantee that customer data will always be stored on their servers, which are located in the EU or Switzerland.

I'm not affiliated with either SpiderOak or LaCie, but we've researched possible cloud storage services last month, and settled on Wuala. So far, no problems.

Re:Privacy?

[w_crossman]

There are two services that I know of which offer truly secure online storage, Wuala and Spideroak. Jungle Disk can be fairly secure, as well. The former two use Java clients, and the latter is native.

Personally, I use Wuala and am pleased with it. There is one hole, though, in that it's possible to state whether a known file is stored in your account; if that's a problem, you could store it in a zip. That's good enough for me, so I use it for synchronization, backup, storage, and file sharing.

Re:Privacy?

[Shoe Puppet]

Don't let the horrible UI performance fool you, Spideroak is based on Python and not Java. Wuala doesn't have any jar or class files in its directory and looks native to me.

Re:Privacy?

[whisper_jeff]

If you're worried about the content of your files, for whatever reason, don't store the file(s) in the cloud. Period.

Re:Privacy?

[gbjbaanb]

Mozy allows you to store stuff on their system with a private encryption. they do warn you loads about "if you lose the key, you lose the data". That's a backup solution primarily, but they're working on a 'stash' that is an instant-sync type thing.

Re:Privacy?

[Mindscrew]

I do this with dropbox. The only problem is you need to use small containers because everytime you add/modify/delete anything , it has to re-upload the whole thing. For this reason, its impractical to have a 100mb true crypt container to hold documents because every little change uploads another 100mb of data.

Re:Privacy?

[dbIII]

The also have all the clowns. If you want to be private from anybody at all you shouldn't use a service like dropbox which has already had an incident where all files were open to anybody on the internet that could guess your username (ie. no authentication at all in that incident). Even at it's best you can't revoke access once you've given it yet it give the illusion that you can. Those losers mucked things up so badly that even plain FTP is more secure - that's a truly epic fail.

Re:Privacy?

[arth1]

Wuala requires java - this is a deal breaker for me.
Are there any other multiplatform remote storage options that doesn't require non-standard and resource intensive runtime components?

Re:Privacy?

[flimflammer]

Does anyone really think Dropbox considers its individual users important enough to attempt to break their truecrypt volumes? I mean there's wearing a tinfoil hat and there's wearing a full tinfoil body suit.

Re:Privacy?

[arth1]

Sounds like you got that ID on the same box you're posting from today.

Sounds like this AC is too green to have figured out how to get an ID yet.
One day, when older, you may grasp concepts like "embedded devices", which generally have a very limited amount of memory and CPU, while at the same time being devices that could benefit from remote storage.

Re:Privacy?

[fnj]

SpriderOak not only LETS you keep your keys; they MAKE you keep your keys. They don't want to see them. They can't access them. They CAN'T decrypt your data, no matter what nazi demands it of them (and they can't get your password back for you if you forget it). The keys never leave your PC. At least that's what they claim. How you prove that when the client is proprietary closed source code, I don't see.

Re:Privacy?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Put a TrueCrypt partition on the drive. Encryption needs to be done at the ends; they are just providing a bit storage medium.

If the protocol is at all useful, there will be a FUSE filesystem that does efficient (small-block oriented) encrypted storage on Google Drive within a month.

Re:Privacy?

[creepynut]

Yes, it only uploads the changes. The Dropbox client still needs to scan the entire container to determine what has changed however.

The only other downfall I have to using Dropbox+Truecrypt is remembering to unmount the volume each time. If you have a Truecrypt volume mounted in multiple locations you end up with a conflicting file which you need to manually correct. It can be a pain.

I use EncFS in my Dropbox (which BoxCryptor is built on). This way the contents are encrypted and the synchronization happens at the file level, less chance of conflicting files. This also means I can set up my home machine to automatically mount the EncFS volume. My concern is about cloud privacy, not about physical privacy in my home so this works well.

Re:Privacy?

[creepynut]

It does not upload 100mb of data. Dropbox syncs at the block level using an rsync-like algorithm. Dropbox definitely needs to scan the entire container to figure out which blocks have changed and upload. I don't know what the block size is like or if it is determined by Truecrypt/Dropbox/both, but chances are if you change 1mb it is only going to upload approximately 1mb.

WebDAV access?

[DdJ]

We'll have to see. If the new "GDrive" can be securely accessed via the open, standard WebDAV protocol, I'll think it's interesting and I'll be an enthusiastic adopter. If not, then it's just another cloud file locker that uses proprietary client software (or a web UI, no good for integration work), which is considerably less interesting.

Re:WebDAV access?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not try the free "hubic" service by OVH. 25GB free.
I use it to backup my linux box (over webdav).

Re:WebDAV access?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Why not try the free "hubic" service by OVH. 25GB free.
I use it to backup my linux box (over webdav).

Interesting. Looks like it needs a dedicated app to access, right ? No folder syncing ? In typical french fashion the whole thing seems monolingual french too. Not a problem for me, but I imagine a lot of Slashdot folks might have difficulty.

remember x drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

about 10 or 12 years ago there were a few websites giving away free storage space(only a few hundred meg, not gigs). The only one I remember the name of was "x drive". Are any of those still around?

Re:remember x drive?

[iYk6]

Super Dimension Fortress has been around for 25 years. I get 50 MB of storage space, accessible over ssh or ftp. If I put it in the html directory, I can access and share it from any browser anywhere.

I haven't moved to any of these new "cloud" storages, because I haven't found anything that I can easily mount and copy files to and from. They all require special software that may or may not be trustworthy.

There are some downsides to SDF:
* limited storage space
* costs 1 dollar (you can keep your anonymity, though. Just send $1 cash, with your username. Return address not necessary)
* takes a month to set up a new account
* no human support or contact

5 GB

[Calos]

Only 5 GB? Anyone else a little surprised by that?

My gmail accounts have more space than that, and people have been writing browser extensions and apps for a while to leverage that as cloud storage. 5 GB is at the high end of current free offerings (it matches SugarSync and Box), but by no means revolutionary. You'd think Google, with their resources, would be offering a bit more, especially with their late entry into the game. I guess they can push the tie-ins to other services - like being able to send attachments in Gmail straight to your Google cloud storage. But other than that, what's the incentive, especially if already using another service?

Re:5 GB

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they were afraid of Facebook and Apple getting together on a script to open a whole bunch of accounts and filling them with gigabytes of random numbers so they couldn't be compressed.

Re:5 GB

[Kittenman]

Only 5 GB? Anyone else a little surprised by that?

Free. Read my lips. Free. I'm sure they can provide some more space for a little (cough) incentive...

Re:5 GB

[jader3rd]

5 GB is at the high end of current free offerings

SkyDrive is 25 GB and free.

Re:5 GB

[Calos]

You're right, I forgot about that (and I even have an account).

I never did use it though, even when I was running Windows and used a third party app to make the SkyDrive service look like a network drive.

Have they added any features? Any native clients that do automatic syncing or anything?

Re:5 GB

[JoeSavage]

Skydrive has a 100MB limitation per file. Dealbreaker.

Re:5 GB

[tgd]

Skydrive has a 100MB limitation per file. Dealbreaker.

Well, thankfully for most people, the files they need to store aren't that big, and that isn't a limitation. Its not a good option for your bookleg movies or porn collection, but 100MB is plenty for photos, documents, etc. A search on my laptop shows basically nothing above that size that isn't an installer, a ZIP containing a bunch of smaller files, or videos that came from either my digital cameras or my HDV video camera.

Personally, I'd like the ability to store my entire media library up on Skydrive or a similar service, but I've been averaging 250GB of new stuff a year, so... its not really an option. And I can't but a terabyte and a half of cloud storage from a reputable place at a reasonable price... yet. So 100MB file sizes are fine for me. I suspect that's probably true of the vast majority of users. (I suspect the size is picked to straddle the line between common legitimate file sizes and file sizes that are more typically found on the various warez-plagued file sharing services.)

Re:5 GB

[jader3rd]

If you use Windows Live Mesh you can have a subset of the 25 GB auto sync. I forget if it's 2 GB or 5 GB, though. I don't use the auto sync, so I don't know for sure.

Re:5 GB

[swillden]

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

Re:5 GB

[djhertz]

Pretty cool, I'm going to check that out.

Re:5 GB

[flimflammer]

The reason they give so much extra space for gmail is because most people won't even use a tenth of that space. Hell, I've had a gmail account since the service came out and I think of my like 9 gigs of space they offer, I'm still only like 1% full. I'm a heavy emailer, I just don't often need to send or receive large attachments.

Google banks on the fact that very few people put lots of data into their emails, even if some people do crazy things like use gmail as a file store, it's still worth it to advertise that amount of space to the masses. It's basically just a marketing ploy. A successful (and useful to end users) ploy, but a marketing ploy none the less.

However with a file storage service, people are far more inclined to actually utilize the space they are given. For example, I've got 5 gigs of space on Dropbox, and I'm already using 35% of it. Google will be less inclined to provide much more space for free than 5GB because more people are more inclined to actually use that space.

Re:5 GB

[nsebban]

EchoFS is 30 GB, also free.

Re:5 GB

[thegarbz]

no monthly fee... always-on server... network connection

Now one of those items doesn't fit well with the other two.

Re:5 GB

[swillden]

no monthly fee... always-on server... network connection

Now one of those items doesn't fit well with the other two.

Well, assuming you're going to have the network connection and server anyway, there's no contradiction.

Re:5 GB

[tlhIngan]

Only 5 GB? Anyone else a little surprised by that?

My gmail accounts have more space than that, and people have been writing browser extensions and apps for a while to leverage that as cloud storage. 5 GB is at the high end of current free offerings (it matches SugarSync and Box), but by no means revolutionary. You'd think Google, with their resources, would be offering a bit more, especially with their late entry into the game. I guess they can push the tie-ins to other services - like being able to send attachments in Gmail straight to your Google cloud storage. But other than that, what's the incentive, especially if already using another service?

Easy - Google knows the utilization rate of Gmail is quite low. They can offer everyone 9+GB of mail storage knowing perhaps only 2% or so of users actually use that much and are actively bumping against that limit.

With GDrive though, people will probably store a LOT of data on there because it's storage that's much more useful to people. So utilization of that would be much higher and maybe even use more storage than gmail.

Re:5 GB

[swillden]

Today is the 7th GMail outage. Who in his right mind would trust those morons who cannot run a simple E-mail service?

Umm, what does the volunteer Tahoe LAFS grid have to do with GMail?

And, according to the dashboard (how many companies publish their service problems, with history, to the whole world?), GMail didn't have an outage, just a disruption. A fairly large one, as GMail disruptions go since it affected almost 10% of GMail users and lasted over an hour, but still hardly an "outage".

And after they scrape all that data

[Nethead]

And after they scrape all that data watch out for GooglePorn.

Re:And after they scrape all that data

[rrohbeck]

The only questions here are
- Can you easily create an anonymous account and
- Can you make your files accessible to others?

Re:And after they scrape all that data

[Nethead]

Not sure anonymous and Google go together. They may not have your street address, but they know what you fap to.

Can Google be trusted with so much Private Data?

[dryriver]

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.

Extremely Thin

[DakotaSmith]

I've got 50GB free at Box and 30GB free on EchoFS.com. Why should I care about 5GB? Just because it's Google?

Re:Extremely Thin

[IANAAC]

I've got 50GB free at Box and 30GB free on EchoFS.com. Why should I care about 5GB? Just because it's Google?

Hey, I don't know why you've been modded down to oblivion, but thanks for mentioning EchoFS. I'd not heard of it before. It works great with davfs in Linux... something that is pretty difficult to find, at least with this amount of space.

Re:Extremely Thin

[Anonymous Coward]

The 50GB at box are useless - as they don't offer a desktop application, you have to upload all the stuff via your web-browser... which is sooo 1999. And the their WebDAV implementation is just WebDAV in name... it's slow as heck and totally unreliable.

Re:Extremely Thin

[DaFallus]

I've got 50GB free at Box and 30GB free on EchoFS.com. Why should I care about 5GB? Just because it's Google?

To be fair, you most likely paid $20 for the extra 45 GB at Box and EchoFS doesn't have any synchronization tools other than setting it up as a network block device. Using EchoFS as a NBD sounds pretty cool, but I have no idea how I could set that up on my phone.

Re:Extremely Thin

[Pigeon451]

How long have you been using echofs? I did a search and couldn't find any mention of people using it other than this thread.

rsync.net

[thetoadwarrior]

I rather use rsync.net than trust my data to an advertising company.

Re:rsync.net

[Skapare]

And you can secure it with encfs.

MS SkyDrive

[El Rey]

MS SkyDrive is 25GB for free and no hoops to jump through. They don't let you store large files though. Seems like they could do better than 5GB...

Re:MS SkyDrive

[Nimey]

I expect Microsoft can handle giving that because they've got a smaller userbase, and who's really going to use 25GB?

Re:MS SkyDrive

[El Rey]

I use it as a free offsite backup for a non-profit I volunteer with. They don't have any large files and I think the drive in the ancient box they are using is only 30GB total anyway... Free. Works well enough for their needs.

Interesting that Google Drive starts at 5GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu One has been offering 5 GB for free for a little while now, as well, so I'm not sure what could be so notable about Google doing the same. I think a free 5 GB to start with is becoming a standard amount for these services.

Docs and gmail

[netsavior]

I'll be honest, as a wannabe author my backup solution involves storing on multiple computers AND gmailing myself copies as lazy-man incremental backups. I am not exactly sure what I would use a cloud drive for, since I already use gmail(and to a lesser extent docs) that way. One really sweet thing is that it is already integrated into my smart phone as-is, because emails with attachments already work there.

I think there IS a consumer gap as far as sharing files bigger than an email attachment without torrent or the like. XKCD summed it up nicely but it seems like nobody has figured out how to do it without going to jail. I am just not quite sure what cloud storage can do (that docs and gmail doesn't, that is legal) without some stupid hardware artificially making it a necessity (e.g. iPad and Kindle Fire omitting storage options)

Re:Docs and gmail

[WrecklessSandwich]

I think there IS a consumer gap as far as sharing files bigger than an email attachment without torrent or the like. XKCD summed it up nicely but it seems like nobody has figured out how to do it without going to jail. I am just not quite sure what cloud storage can do (that docs and gmail doesn't, that is legal) without some stupid hardware artificially making it a necessity (e.g. iPad and Kindle Fire omitting storage options)

Dropbox actually solved this quite nicely. When you register an account, there's a "Public" folder (you can share other folders as well, only Public is shared by default). You can send anyone a download link to any file in the Public folder. I recently had to send a ~200MB RAR archive to several different people in another city. I copied it into my Dropbox/Public folder on my hard drive, waited for it to finish uploading, and right clicked on it in Explorer and there was a "Copy public link" button -- you can get the same URL by logging into your account on the Dropbox website. I sent my colleagues the URL and that was that, no hassle at all.

I can't speak for Spideroak, SkyDrive, etc. as I have not tried them. A cursory look at Spideroak indicates that it has a similar feature, but with much tighter access control capabilities. As far as I can tell the only security to Dropbox public sharing is that you need the download URL, which can obviously get passed around. The public URL for the aforementioned 200MB RAR has not changed in the past... almost a month since I uploaded it, so I doubt the URL has any kind of expiration date.

G:\ In use.

[PlusFiveTroll]

I already have a G: drive, can we remap it to another drive letter?

Re:G:\ In use.

[Bitmanhome]

The drive is not called "G:", it's called "Google:". Only works on Amiga.

The internet wants to know ...

[Skapare]

... can I migrate my megauploads?

The question is...

[joh]

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.

Re:The question is...

[Rich0]

Yup, and the Chrome browser is practically an OS at the rate it is going. 80% of the source code is stuff that is probably already on your hard drive if you use linux, but which will now be loaded a second time in RAM because Google doesn't believe in dynamic linking...

Re:The question is...

[Anomalyst]

which will now be loaded a second time in RAM because Google doesn't believe in dynamic linking.

Run it in a VM and let the hypervisor automatically dedup identical memory blocks.

Question before I sign up

[Tokolosh]

Is my data stored in the US?

Does the US government claim to have jurisdiction over my data? (I think I know the answer to this one).

You can have 10 GB google storage here instantly

[yooy]

http://sr71.net/projects/gmailfs/ Should also be possible to just mount it via cryptoloop for encryption.

Gmail Drive Shell Extention

[flogger]

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm Been in use for a long time... If this is as easy to use as Dropbox and as easy to share as that or as easy as google docs, then sign me up.

Years too late Google

[Snaller]

After you have been forcing G+ on everybody I'm never going to use any of your new services.

Re:Can Google be trusted with so much Private Data

[Anonymous Coward]

First, I don't get this paranoia about "Google knows everything about you!". Even if it's true, I don't really see how it matters for an average Joe like me. Somebody has to elaborate _how_ it's bad, otherwise it's on "But they know you watch porn!" level - let them, I hope they like midget tranny porn. You (or someone) really should elaborate on this sometime.

Second, why single out Google? If you're so paranoid, a) don't let single bit leave your PC unencrypted, b) don't share single bit with anyone. Also, browse all the web through anonymous VPN proxies, change them often, and so on, and so on.

Right now, every second site includes a dozen social media buttons, a few analytics scripts, some ad scripts and sticks "We reserve the right to sell your soul^W^W^Wshare anonymized untrackable cross-our-heart-unidentifiable (honest) usage data with 3rd party"

Ahhh 1997

[future assassin]

when geocities, freeyellow, angelfire and etc... offering 10mb was plenty.

Re:Ahhh 1997

[flimflammer]

Man, thinking back... I remember when Geocities offered a whopping 2 megs of storage, and then Angelfire came around, boasting an amazing 5 megs. When Geocities matched the 5 meg space, Angelfire upgraded to 10 megs. Good times.

Re:404 Error LOL

[flimflammer]

Why would it be anything but a 404? The service hasn't even been released yet.

Re:What's really interesting

[flimflammer]

Probably because it requires Windows 8?

I'm no slow adopter of new versions of Windows, but even I'm a bit weary of upgrading to Windows 8. I think Microsoft is taking too much focus away from what desktops are for and putting too much focus on tablets. I want my desktop to behave like a desktop, not a tablet, and even if I disable the whole Metro thing, there's certain changes that were made that I'm not comfortable with.

Re:What's really interesting

[flimflammer]

Edit: I suppose I was misinformed about SkyDrive's availability. Appears it doesn't require Windows 8.

No sync for that 25GB SkyDrive!

[zaimoglu]

Microsoft has got it all wrong with the SkyDrive. Firstly, there are TWO DIFFERENT services: (1) SkyDrive gives you 25GB of free cloud space but WITHOUT synchronization capabilities, so you need to manually keep track of your files, (2) a synchronization service that goes by the name of Live SkyDrive or LiveMesh, with only 5GB space. This second service is the one that can truly be compared to Dropbox. The problems with SkyDrive are not limited to this mind boggling confusion. The 25GB service does not allow you to upload folders. You MUST manually create your folders and only then can you upload your files, though you can select more than one file at this stage. Microsoft really expects you to carefully examine your directory tree and create folders manually!

Buy Dropbox

[XrayJunkie]

I guess it will end this way ... or facebook will do it.

Since lots of people are posting alternatives...

[olau]

... one of them is Hostigation. They have a relatively inexpensive backup plan, 0.04 USD per GB storage per month allocated in 30 GB chunks.

So it's not free, but there's no magic in it either. You get your own little Debian VPS so you can use rsync or whatever you fancy. It's not really redundant, though, so if the server goes down for good, you'll have to reupload the data.

Google, do it this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Google, this is how you implement a cloud drive CORRECTLY:

1. Offer more initial storage space than all of the competitors for FREE
2. Offer additional storage space far more cheaply, than your competitors - you already do this for Google Apps, you have a good start.
3. Provide cross-platform desktop and mobile apps, with consistent interfaces, that provide "DropBox" light functionality, for FREE
4. Merge the Google Apps and Picasa (and anything of service's) storage spaces into one location.
5. Do not put a small, arbitrary limit of file size, or any other limits, such as spreadsheet row/column restrictions

You are close to this already:

Actual:
1. DropBox offers more space than Google Apps, initially
2. You already do this, for pennies. It's far cheaper than DropBox.
3. Insync provides a nice beta app for this functionality. However, the mobile apps, coming in May, will not be free.
4. I hope this will happen when you implement GDrive. Please.
5. Only the spreadsheet limitation exists, afaik.

In conclusion, Google, you are very close to this functionality. It would take hardly any effort to have a complete solution.

No, they're not

[daboochmeister]

You're ignoring that Google will be excluding from the storage quota for GDrive:

• GMail storage (7 GB free)
• Google Docs usage (not sure of amt free, but it's decent for docs)
• Picasa picture/video storage (10GB free, right?)
• Google Music (20K songs free - at 5MB/song, that's 100GB)

SkyDrive probably has one or two similar exclusions, but I doubt in aggregate that it exceeds what Google is providing free.

Re:No, they're not

[pnutjam]

I'm at 1GB for Picassa, I would love to get 10GB. Maybe it's because it is part of a custom domain...

Adrive free 50 gigs

[Sami Lehtinen]

Adrive.com has offer 50 gigs for years. Therefore 5 gigs for free is not enough, unless some other features are exceptionally good.