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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.
...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.
What happens when your house floods, catches fire, electrical storm fries the machine, RAID controller fails and writes gibberish, OS update goes sideways, you fat finger an rm command, etc? Offsite backups can be very useful. Maybe you don't push everything offsite but there's probably a class of data you'd like to know will survive when something happens to your freenas.
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!
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'."
Setting up auto-pilot offsite backups is important, if you care about your data.
What I care about doesn't need to live 24/7 on the Internet.
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.