Slashdot Mirror
Google Drive Will Soon Back Up Your Entire Computer (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is turning Drive into a much more robust backup tool. Soon, instead of files having to live inside of the Drive folder, Google will be able to monitor and backup files inside of any folder you point it to. That can include your desktop, your entire documents folder, or other more specific locations. The backup feature will come out later this month, on June 28th, in the form of a new app called Backup and Sync. In some other news, Box announced on Wednesday desktop apps for its storage service.
This is something I could use every day...when pointed to reverse encFS mounts, that is ;-)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, no it won't.
I got a FreeNAS file server to store my data and backup all my systems.
Really, any year now.
...they will examine it all for clues to provide targeted advertising.
Next will be looking for hate speech and porn and reporting it to the authorities.
No thanks.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...but I prefer my NAS!
Wonder how much of your data will be parsed, stored, collated and available to the IRS, NSA and others at their discretion?
Wish such thoughts were tin-foil conspiracy type things.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
This move by Google likely guarantees that porn would be sufficiently duplicated to survive collapse of our civilization.
OK, so it's not useful to you. Not all services need to be just for you. I have 150Mbps up, so that changes things a bit, doesn't it? I currently use CrashPlan, but they significantly raised their fees.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
if I have time to view those joke video with joker
Full (disk, partition, folder) encryption. Let Google store all the encrypted bytes they want. Let NSA do what they do - analyze
Initial load can take a while to push (a week?), but then you only need to push the diffs which are much smaller. I've done this with multiple backup services as I've moved from one to another, and both services handled this just fine. I just kept the old service paid up till I moved to the new one and my stuff uploaded. Were I to move to this from Crashplan it would be the same story. It's all automated so it's not like it requires active participation.
/Dr.Evil
#DeleteFacebook
I don't think Google wants to get into the business of saving crap for nothing (or pennies).
For reference: https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Yeah, let's put our ENTIRE history up for grabs, people can analyse our private lives and preferences, create ad campaigns, have NSA predict our movements, have governments predict our actions and political preferences and take steps to keep us in ignorance at best, or coerce us into submission at worst. Let's all create a world where our intellectual/psychological profiles can be used by marketing and politically interested parties, infiltrating our private lives as well as public lives to the point we are nothing more than cattle being moved around on the grazing fields. Are people truly so ignorant that we just give away everything about ourselves for the sake of convenience? Cell phone apps (with the data they extract, often without phone owner's knowledge) are bad enough. But this...Windows 10 of course contributes to this too (which we should all be shunning in favor of Linux (Linux Mint is the user friendly fave distro), but to upload your ENTIRE computer drive contents to a data mining company.... Wow, just...wow.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Does this come with already baked in support for NSA prism selectors, too?
So, um, maybe Google could actually roll this out to android first so that users have a proper full device backup. Just an idea?
Also, Yay, now both Microsoft & Google get all may data.
Google will be able to monitor and backup files inside of any folder you point it to.
Even /dev/urandom?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Putting aside the notion of google and privacy issues, current google drive doesn't do file versioning. That, alone, tanks the notion of using it for "backups", although it's a pretty convenient file sharing tool.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
There is a lot of important stuff there that I wouldn't want to lose.
So it's come to this? They expect/encourage you to DIRECTLY give them all your Most Persona and Private Data? WTF, Google!? What's next, "Let us store all that banking and credit card information for you!". Fuck that shit. Glad I have nothing to do with any Google services that require a sign-in.
FTFY
I'll bet they shut it down in a few years and everyone will bitch about Google shutting down yet another service...
Boris: "We need an insidious plan to steal the private data from the Americans, every single one!"
Natasha: "Well, why don't we just ask them to give it to us?"
Boris: "You think that would work?"
Natasha (long pause): "We could say 'please'."
I'd sooner trust Microsoft with my data in Azure. As people have been mentioning, I wouldn't be surprised if they randomly just pulled the plug with little notice, probably after they realize that most of the interesting stuff is encrypted and/or unprofitable.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Holy shit, it's like we've forgotten about the major privacy implications of the first version of this: Google Desktop
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
"I have 150Mbps up"
60 hours to back up my 4TB drive at that speed. I could overnight the drive itself and have it there and fully replicated multiple times over in under 24 hours.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Let's assume for a second that you actually would want all your important stuff backed up to the Google cloud (I don't). This kind of thing almost never works. File systems allow you (and the applications you run) to store a file almost anywhere in the directory tree. You can create new folders all the time. Maybe you have found a way to make sure ALL your important stuff gets saved to a few folders that are backed up and that some huge file containing unimportant data never gets put there, but I have found file systems woefully lacking in this area. You also have to make sure all your important folders get listed in the backup list, otherwise you end up missing something. I create huge test files all the time on my system and the last thing I would want is those files pushed up to the cloud. They would eat up bandwidth and storage space and I don't care about the data in them.
Um, OK. Not sure what your point is unless you find yourself continuously uploading your entire drive. I have a few gigs change per day, so not an issue for me. Been doing this for years - even on DSL it took about 30 days for the initial backup, but the connection was more than capable of keeping up with daily changes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Not to mention that they only give you 15 GB of storage for free. If you want to back up your entire 2 TB hard drive, that's going to cost you $20 a month.
For that kind of money, I think that I'll just buy a 2 TB portable drive for around $100 put an encrypted backup on that, and leave it in my cubicle at work.
Google continues its efforts to learn all that is known by MS.
I've only checked it with speedtest sites. I'm not sure how else to check it. Upstream speed is rarely my bottleneck. I've seen torrents get about that high, but honestly it's not something I think about much. If there is a specific test you'd like to see let me know and I'll run it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I guess you've never heard of "Overnight Shipping" which has been a thing for like 30 years or so.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Google that.
I'll settle for my Linux blade servers and 1000 Gbps port, thanks.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A cloud service run by an advertising company backing up my computer?
Like hell it will.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...but with much less free storage and no end-to-end encryption
Typical Verge. "Documents, desktop, pictures" = "entire computer".
No. No it doesn't. When someone says "entire computer", I think "that means the entire computer" not "that means my documents". Google Drive cannot backup c:\windows\ or other locked / key files. The title of this article makes it sound like this is a full disk backup, which it's most certainly not - all they're letting you do is change the directory Google Drive syncs. ownCloud has done this for literally years.
TheVerge is supposed to be a tech site but they don't seem to understand much outside of fashion blogging.
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
No, no it will not.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
That doesn't even cover what in my Documents folder.
"Google Drive Will Soon Back Up Your Entire Computer" ...whether you want it to or not.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I keep my files where most people do, at the NSA, why use a middleware solutuin like Google when you can just to straight to the source.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
I have 1000d500u fibre and I upload to crashplan Australia at about 250mbps (from NZ). Sometimes a bit faster, sometimes slower. Seems good to me.
If Google plans to sell this service and have decent encryption, then it could be a good competitor for Carbonite.
Make love, not reality television.
I don't trust Google Drive with any file of mine, let alone my entire computer.
Approximately 100 months with my 20GB/month connection, and it would cost me about 20 times what my laptop and hard drive cost put together.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"