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Google Drive Goes Live

Posted by Soulskill on from the another-day-another-cloud-thing dept.

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."

42 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. Forget this garbage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Access requires a proprietary client.

    Where are open, standard protocols which don't require unvetted Google software to be trusted with power over our computers?

    1. Re:Forget this garbage by schitso · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You mean like the ones used by Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box?

      Oh wait...

    2. Re:Forget this garbage by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Forget this garbage by yog · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's free, and it's Google. I would trust Google to be around for a while, to charge decent prices and provide useful tools to access the drive, and also I believe them when they say no human will see my stuff. Some other companies, such as Facebook, I don't trust nearly as much, because they seem to lack Google's commitment to be a trustworthy arbitrator of data.

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    4. Re:Forget this garbage by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 3, Funny

      They all seem to include drive, box or cloud. Which one will be next? DriveBoxCloud? BoxCloudDrive? CloudDriveBox?

    5. Re:Forget this garbage by tgd · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    6. Re:Forget this garbage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Even MS

      "Even MS", as in "even MS are using a proprietary client and a non-standardized protocol"? o_O

    7. Re:Forget this garbage by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem goes deeper than that: Unless you go with encryption-on-client(ideally handled by a dedicated security processor, so that the key is never available to the potentially untrustworthy uploader-agent), which is comparatively rare because it breaks handy features like 'access from the web' and deduplication, the cloud storage provider gets to paw through your files by design.

      Now, I do have to wonder why Google used a proprietary client(given their history of, for instance, OSSing their updater widget in order to calm people's fears about what it might be up to) when your data will be showing up on their servers in short order anyway, and file transfer over the internet isn't exactly an area of cutting-edge research.(Hi rysnc, how's it going?). One would think that an OSSed client would provide minimal competitive advantage to others, while helping to alleviate the 'our google overlords creep me out' response.

      More generally, though, there really isn't a 'clientless'(ie. client is installed by default) option at present. The browser-based upload widgets are hacky as hell and often flake out on larger files, the java/activeX ones are incrementally more reliable but far more demanding and dodgy. FTP is horribly insecure and crotchety, SFTP causes barely a ripple outside a few geek circles. WebDAV seems to have gone nowhere for something like two decades now, some sort of NFS/SMB over VPN is ugly and wouldn't play nicely with many setups... A FUSE based FS would be nice for team linux; but arguably counts as a 'client' and doesn't help the majority of the market much...

      I'd certainly trust an OSS client over a closed one; but it's hard to hold the need for a client of some kind against them at the moment.

    8. Re:Forget this garbage by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You do know what a scraper is, right? It's a script. An automated script. One that no human generally deals with (unless it's broken).

      As a matter of fact, I do. But oddly enough, yesterday's Dilbert cartoon is apropos.

      If something is scraping it, it is available to be read by humans.

      Now, if they tell us that under no circumstances will any entity ever peek into my data then I'd believe it to be secure. Well, even then, I'm not sure I'd "believe" that.

      Otherwise, it's being opened and read and cataloged and indexed. I don't care if it's a scraper, or an intern at that point. You may see a magical difference between those, but I don't.

      --
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    9. Re:Forget this garbage by suomynonAyletamitlU · · Score: 3, Funny

      "Cloud, cloud, drive, spam, box, spam, and drive. It hasn't got much spam in it..."

      I was going for a monty python reference, but I'm sure enterprising netizens will find a way to put the other kind of spam on there, too.

    10. Re:Forget this garbage by Marillion · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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    11. Re:Forget this garbage by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Ah, thanks for the negative mod, there. Fine, I'll go into more detail: Google didn't just make a client, they're providing the storage, connection, maintenance, etc. It's also for business purposes, not a charity. Of course they want control over the client. If you're going to demand otherwise, you might as well just hold up a sign saying "I want the word Insightful to appear next to my post!"

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    12. Re:Forget this garbage by hendridm · · Score: 3

      Actually that's all pretty much wrong.. it supports a lot more then Google Docs formated files - in fact even shows thumbnails apparently of a lot of standard file types when browsing. Integration seems to be it's sweet spot.

      I go to drive.google.com with my regular, non-Apps gmail login, and it says something like:
      "Google Docs is currently not available." ...and there's a "Notify Me" button for when it's available. (I am in the U.S.)

      Don't need an Apps account - works fine on regular users

      I go to drive.google.com with my Apps account, and it says:
      "Google Drive is not yet enabled for the My Company Name domain."

      So I go to my Apps admin account and enable it in the "Drive and Docs" admin area, which AFAICT, is the only place in the admin menus where it's referenced. I go to the Drive section and make sure both check boxes are checked.

      I go to Google Docs, and whoopedy-doooo, I can save Docs files online (which I thought I could do before)! Fun!

    13. Re:Forget this garbage by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Microsoft would be sued from here to the moon and back if they included this sort of sync within Windows, bound to their servers.

      Oh, and also ripped to shit on here.

    14. Re:Forget this garbage by shadowrat · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think the OP had a legitimate gripe. Not everyone wants to run a local executable from a company that has demonstrated a lot of interest in prying into your privacy. Granted, if you are choosing to store your files on drive, you must have some trust in them. However, what guarantee do the paranoid have that the drive client will not just be silently uploading everything you have to google. I'm not sure it's even hyperbole to suggest a point in the future where the drive client might say, "good news! you can now store everything you have on Drive! To make it easy for you, we've already uploaded all your data!"

      Google could easily have provided a client built upon an open api and won a lot of favor.

    15. Re:Forget this garbage by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Informative

      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!).

    16. Re:Forget this garbage by cerberusss · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'd go for shit. Where did I leave my shit? Oh fuck, I left it in the cloud. ShitCloud (TM).

      Or dump. I'ma dumpin' my shit in the cloud.

      --
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  2. Good backup for important files by cpu6502 · · Score: 3, Funny

    My resume, my tax returns, purchased books..... just in case the house burns down & eats my USB backup drive.

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    1. Re:Good backup for important files by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Don't forget to encrypt all this before sending it to "the cloud"

    2. Re:Good backup for important files by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
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    3. Re:Good backup for important files by swillden · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    4. Re:Good backup for important files by LateArthurDent · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you...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.

      I've been seeing both Windows and Mac moving in the direction of trying to abstract me from the location where files are saved in favor of searching for them. I've never understood that use model. I don't mind that other people would find their files that way, but I've never had to search for a file in my life. I just save them in logical places and they're always where I expect them to be. It's most certainly not what I want to do 99% of the time.

      It must be a result of working with a computer back when indexing every single file in your box would have been an insane waste of storage space, the indexing process would have taken an insane amount of time during which my computer would have been unusable because I'd only have a single core, and the search through the index would still be slow enough that it'd be faster to navigate to the file. In those days, we wore an onion in our belts, because that was the style at the time...

  3. Mixed bag compared to Dropbox by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Versions count against your storage, trash counts against your storage, Google Docs files do not, shared files do not.

    No right-click menu in the desktop client, so no grabbing public links etc.

    No ability to name the Google Drive folder, only choose its location (the same as dropbox, but a lot of people were hoping for "pick any folder anywhere").

    Speed is a bit faster.

    Storage prices a lot cheaper ($9.99/month for 200GB vs $9.99 for 50GB on Dropbox).

    There is offline access to Google Docs stuff, not tried that yet.

    The Windows client is very very very similar to an old Dropbox version - even down to "Selective Sync" within the Google Drive folder.

    Android and iOS apps - no Blackberry app yet.

    All in all, I haven't come to a conclusion yet - better in some aspects, worse in others. I think a lot of people were expecting a lot more from Google Drive than this offering.

    1. Re:Mixed bag compared to Dropbox by yog · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
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  4. Not for "Google Apps for your domain" users. by Simulant · · Score: 4, Informative


    Yet again.

  5. Re:Google:Let us know everything else about you by readandburn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wouldn't you encrypt your files before uploading them? I would.

  6. Re:No thanks. by dyingtolive · · Score: 4, Informative

    I will still be able to sleep at night knowing that evil Google has my collection of Warhammer 40k army lists and Dungeons and Dragons character backstories.

    If we all do this, maybe then Games Workshop will realize that there's more to 40k than Space Marines and Hasbro will finally get the hint that we all hated 4th edition and think Drizzt can suck the business end of a crossbow.

    Just to clarify: I like my privacy, but I understand when my privacy stops being just that; Anything I do not wish to become public I do not make as such.

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  7. Porn? by BenoitRen · · Score: 3, Funny

    Does this allow the storage of porn? :)

    1. Re:Porn? by who_stole_my_kidneys · · Score: 5, Funny

      you only have 5GB of porn? damn, guess im perverted one :-P

    2. Re:Porn? by TubeSteak · · Score: 4, Funny

      you only have 5GB of porn? damn, guess im perverted one :-P

      He probably has the exact same number of files as you, but all the videos have been downconverted to postage stamp sized real media files.
      I mean, haven't you ever looked at a girl and wished she was slightly more... pixelated?

      --
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      o0t!
  8. They are too lazy to check browser language prefs by weeble · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Google as ever uses reverse IP lookup rather than browser preferences to set the language (language preferences only work once you log in and often even not when logged in). They assume people do not travel and everyone within a particular geographical area will only speak the dominant language.

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  9. Re:SkyDrive + Dropbox = Even better by WolfgangPG · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is all out of date as of yesterday. Max file size sync has changed, etc... Please keep up!

    Skydrive offers 7GB for Free, Google Drive offers 5GB. Sky Drive offers a max of 100GB of Paid Storage, Google Drive offers 16TB of paid storage.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/23/the-next-chapter-for-skydrive-personal-cloud-storage-for-windows-available-anywhere.aspx
    https://apps.live.com/skydrive

    They need to update their Google compare: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/compare
    Make sure you keep up with the news :)

  10. Re:The most important question by Pausanias · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:Huge price hike by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  12. Re:The most important question by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 3, Informative

    SpiderOak, though a slightly different syncing style, also works on Linux natively. Quite nicely, too.

  13. No linux client by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dropbox has one, Google Drive doesn't. That's a killer for me.

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    Infuriate left and right
  14. Specifics? by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It appears to only work with Google Docs

    This is true in the sense that Google Docs could already store any kind of file and what Google did with drive was:
    1. Rename Google Docs to "Drive"
    2. Expand the free storage quota
    3. Provide desktop and mobile apps and SDK

    Its false in the sense that you can store files that Google Docs can't edit (and, you can use the web interface to edit files that Docs can't edit itself, since the Drive SDK allows Drive apps installed through the Chrome Web Store to register associations with file types so that "open with [app]" is available from the Drive UI (and the user can chose to set an app as the default editor for a particular file type, as well.)

    I tried signing up with my regular gmail account and it wouldn't let me.

    I had no problem logging in with my non-apps account. In fact, if I'm logged in and navigate to docs.google.com, I actually get the Drive web UI (which is virtually identical to what the Docs UI was before Drive was introduced.)

    Plus, I thought you could store your Docs files online before?

    Google Docs included both a number of file editor applications and universal (any file) cloud storage. Drive is basically an enhancement to the cloud storage part (which is now renamed) to expand the free quota, provide desktop apps which provide desktop integration, providing an SDK, etc,

    I don't see how it's different, except being much less useful than its competitors.

    How is it "much less useful than its competitors"?

  15. SkyDrive REST apis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

    1. Re:SkyDrive REST apis by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

      So does Google Drive. https://developers.google.com/drive/v1/reference/

  16. Re:Google drive with True Crypt? by Binestar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Convenient and encryption doesn't seem to go well together. The closest I have found for windows and these cloud devices is AxCrypt, which lets you encrypt and password protect each individual file you store.

    --
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  17. Re:Google drive with True Crypt? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Try BoxCryptor. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/encrypt-dropbox-files-boxcryptor/. Install it on each machine. It creates a Drive that acts as a front end to the cloud drive and encrypts/decrypts on the fly. I saw it here a couple of weeks ago for some other article. I would post on my other account, but I am modding too. I want to help, but not strip the modded posts. :)

  18. Re:The most important question by sanvila · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.