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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
Put a TrueCrypt partition on the drive. Encryption needs to be done at the ends; they are just providing a bit storage medium.
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?
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
This is that Ars article.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
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.
I've got 50GB free at Box and 30GB free on EchoFS.com. Why should I care about 5GB? Just because it's Google?
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
I rather use rsync.net than trust my data to an advertising company.
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).
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...
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The only questions here are
- Can you easily create an anonymous account and
- Can you make your files accessible to others?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
I already have a G: drive, can we remap it to another drive letter?
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.
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).
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
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.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
After you have been forcing G+ on everybody I'm never going to use any of your new services.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If you're worried about the content of your files, for whatever reason, don't store the file(s) in the cloud. Period.
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.
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!