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Google Drive Goes Live
lemmen writes "As widely expected, Google Drive has launched officially today. Google Drive is free for the first 5GB, while you can get an upgrade to 25GB for $2.50 a month. They say the service is available for PCs, Macs, Android devices, and soon iOS devices. According to Mercury News, '... the success of Drive will ride largely on whether Google can differentiate its offering from already established fast-growing cloud storage startups that were in the market first, such as Dropbox and Box, as well as Microsoft's SkyDrive service and big consumer media competitors like Apple's iCloud and Amazon's Cloud Drive. ... Existing Google Docs files, the centerpiece of Google's existing cloud storage offering, will move to the Google Drive service once users download apps and install the new service."
Don't forget SkyDrive. Even MS, who knows Windows inside and out, install a special client and just sync files back and forth like everyone else does.
Yes, let's all give Google more daa about ourselves to mine for their advertiser customers. Wooo... Hoo?
Remember, you are the product not the customer.
Yet again.
SkyDrive offers 25GB (max size per file is 100MB) for free. This allows almost all of my files to be stored on the SkyDrive. All of the large files and sensitive documents go in my TC container and synced with Dropbox, which, with all the incentives, is up to 3GB of free space.
What I really wish i could find would be a program that would split a truecrypt container into multiple files of a set size. Then the whole thing would fit on the SkyDrive.
Perhaps when viewed in isolation, Drive is not that much better than DropBox, but when you add in other Google services such as music.google.com, Google wins. I have 60 gigs of music stored on music.google.com, at zero cost, and I think I can upload about 9,000 more files before I hit the free limit.
Google Picasa allows unlimited storage for images of up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes. I've only put a few things on Picasa as yet, but I suspect that almost all of my 254 gigs of images and video clips will qualify as free storage at Picasa.
And, of course, as you point out, Google Docs files don't count toward storage, so if you allow them to convert your Word/OO/Libre files over to Docs format, you're all set.
I suspect that for a lot of people, the free 5 gigs in combination with Google's Music and Picasa services will just about cover everything.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Don't forget SkyDrive. Even MS, who knows Windows inside and out, install a special client and just sync files back and forth like everyone else does.
If you were to use a virtual filesystem driver or a filesystem filter and stream it directly, you need admin rights to install and you have a very different security profile (because the driver would need to be able to sync from multiple Live accounts across all the profiles on the workstation).
Is it possible to do direct streaming/caching as a mounted drive/directory? Absolutely. I wrote one a few years ago that would attach a WebDAV share onto the system. That's basically how all the various app streaming products work. But its a lousy model for a light-weight consumer system.
No. Only Dropbox supports linux, and does it extremely well (though still proprietary).
Dropbox is the first internet company I've been excited about since Google back in 1998. They are run by a bunch of geeks, like Google used to be (MIT though, east coast style leadership vs. west coast/Stanford). Their syncing solution is elegant and just works. The day I tried Dropbox was they day my opinion of "the cloud" changed from a load of bull to actually something worthy of serious attention.
If I remember, this is also why Google made some quiet, but threatening, noises about what they would do to anybody who made serious use of the cute little 'gmailFS' FUSE projects that are available to slap a filesystem-like structure on top of your Gmail storage space.
It isn't rocket-surgery that Gmail quotas are often largely underused, and the stuff that is used is rich with delicious keywords to be mined any monetized, while bulk file storage brings out the packrat in people, and frequently ends up containing big huge lumps of 'boring-and-probably-pirated-.iso-I-might-need-again' which aren't worth much to the marketdroids...
SpiderOak, though a slightly different syncing style, also works on Linux natively. Quite nicely, too.
Make sure that safe is fire safe for electronics. Most fire safes brag about keeping the interior to 350F or so for a few hours. Solder flows just above that, so electronics aren't good in them. But some safes are better; you just have to be careful.
Infuriate left and right
Until someone writes an FOSS tool based upon https://developers.google.com/drive/v1/reference/ The really ambitious ones could write a FUSE layer on top of it.
This is a boring sig
Dropbox has one, Google Drive doesn't. That's a killer for me.
Infuriate left and right
Don't forget to encrypt all this before sending it to "the cloud"
There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you. I have thousands of files in mine (I work for Google and have been using it for a few months, with a very generous storage limit, so I've got lots in there), and although you can organize things in hierarchical directories, the search features are the way I find the stuff I want 99% of the time. What makes it really nice is that it indexes everything -- it can parse virtually any file format, and even uses the Google Goggles technology to extract textual descriptions of objects in images, and I think it also does OCR on images as well.
Of course, if you're more worried about Google extracting information from your files than about your ability to find them, then this aggressive search indexing is stronger motivation to encrypt. If you just want to be able to find your stuff easily, from anywhere, it rocks, and encrypting will break it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
SkyDrive has a bunch of REST apis you can use that don't require installing any client software: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh243648.aspx
I see dropbox still tries to mislead people into thinking their client is Free (and according to you, succeeds in it). Their website weasels around the subject but the truth is that only the small piece that integrates with the file manager is open source and the actual client is not.
Exactly. This is from the nautilus-dropbox Debian package available in non-free:
Installing this package will download the proprietary dropbox binary from dropbox.com.
That's far from being free software, unfortunately.
SkyDrive is actually WebDAV, it's just not really advertized as such. But you can see it when you enable SkyDrive integration in MS Office and look at the file paths in file open/save dialogs.
Anyway, if you want a cloud disk service with open, documented protocol and the ability to mount it as a regular disk drive in pretty much any OS, that would be Jungle Disk (they even have a FUSE provider!).