Google's Drive + Gmail: A 10GB Dropbox killer In the realm of digital overlords, Google just took one more step toward being the lord of all. While Google+ has failed to draw crowds as a social network, Google has made collaboration through existing networks exceptionally easy. This week Google introduced the ability to send supersized email attachments of up to 10GB. In …
From more thorough coverage:-
"If users do want to attach files as large as 10GB, however, they will have to upgrade their existing free Google Drive accounts, which provide 5GB of storage for free. That’s because the new upload limit is larger than the free storage space given to each Google Drive user. Additional drive storage starts at $2.49 (£1.55) a month for up to 25GB of storage."
Gdrive limit is only 5GB unless you pay, so how are many of us going to send 10 GB files from it ....
(and yes I know most the free online storage accounts - I use Dropbox and Skydrive, but Google are making the ability to send a 10 GB email as a USP).
I have one of those new Samsung Chromebooks which comes with 100GB of Google Drive space free for 2 years, so this additional GMail integration means I won't be using my Box account any more. The Google Drive Chromebook integration is completely seamless.
However, the Google Drive Android app still needs some work - you can't easily download a file to your SD card for example which seems like a glaring omission to me.
Another ES File Explorer user here... I've got it linked up to Google Drive (5Gb), Dropbox (4.75Gb) and Box (50Gb - for free when signing up via the Android app!). Still keep the Dropbox client though as it automatically uploads all images/video taken with the camera as soon as they are taken (settings permitting) - There are smaller apps that do the same job but I've only found ones that just upload images and not video too.
I write documents in Drive (or what was Docs before). When I have finished I email them to my editor. At the moment that involves downloading as text and then uploading to Gmail again.
This is not made any simpler by sharing. I do not want to force the recipient to log on to Docs but the sent "link" is to a live version rather than a downloadable format of my choice. In essence this is just an extension of the "share" option and is not even as good as the "email as an attatchment" option in docs (which for some reason gets caught in spam filters much more and only allows a single attatchment)
Don't neglect your privacy when using cloud storage.
Some cloud service providers such as Google and Dropbox hold the keys to your data. That's great if you forget your password and can convince them who you are. However, the cost is that their systems get to rummage through your data for commercial gain.
There are alternative cloud providers such as Wuala that don't hold your keys. Everything gets encrypted automatically before it's sent to the cloud. It works just the same, but it's private.
if you don't look after your privacy, you're part of the problem.
I tried it. It wormed itself so deeply into my system I didn't know what it had access to anymore. It scared the poop out of me. When I tried to get rid of it I had a very difficult time getting rid of it. It was DEEP within my system and on multiple devices at that point. I love ten gig mail, just remember not to send anything too private on it, as it is monitored.
You did this on your production machine instead of testing it in a VM or on a dedicated test machine ?! I hope you're not working in IT!
As for monitoring, I strongly believe people should get accustomed with encryption before even getting closer to a cloud storage.
"I love Dropbox, and have used it in both the personal and corporate contexts. At work, it's a great way to share folders with colleagues as we collaborate on presentations or other files. It's also a convenient way to keep a digital storage locker across my different devices."
If you're very nice to the IT people they might tell you about the network.
In the US, there's a law that declares emails older than 180 days to be "abandoned" - which means law enforcement can access them without a signed warrant on probable cause.
Using GMail as a storage service exposes your documents to unwarranted seizure. Storage services like Dropbox still can't be legally accessed by law enforcement without a warrant.
about $100, 10 year plan
The good
No Google, No Facebook, No Myspace, No Youtube, No Skype, No Magic Jack
can run light things like encrypted voice, file share, a root shell, ssh, nginx, modsec
Stick box behind a firewall and only the ports you need can be turned on and off with port knock (SPA)
Which means you can face to face deliver binaries to acquaintances, which knock their way in, and close on the way out
It can have it's own IPTABLES that allow only several IP's in, or emergency cutting off getting packets from the entire web including the local lan or switch it's plugged into in only 256 lines of synchronized blacklist.
0.0.0.0/8
...
255.255.255.0/8
echo "Done: No packets no mo..."
The bad
Security takes valuable daily productivity time
Tuning the performance takes time
Finding the IP's of your small network and getting them into the various rules can be a pain, so you'll probably benefit from some free Dynamic DNS service
It's unmanaged, so if you get cracked because you didn't protect it, you are on your own to fix it, and it might make you stay up for days sometimes. If you want sneaky shit you have to invent, and script it. Figure out what it is you really want to do, kill all the other services and crap, only run what is NEEDED.
This system ain't for running a wikileaks mirror obviously, but it can get you the hell out of all that social crap.and at least feel like back in the bbs days, even though fios splitters are sucking up every packet they can, if your packets are rubbish then who gives a fuck cause you'll never know if they can crack it or not, and in any event mobsters at least won't be looking at plain text to rob your bank accounts, or destroy your live via casual chat. You'll need to replace some fans,add it to the cost, and buy them ASAP. If your like me you have this crap laying around and anything connected to a toilet paper roll ducktaped to the hole, which sucks air is enough cooling for such a low power system.
I can hear you asking already... Yes you can go with a high powered system, fuck my low powered 486 crap. But I wanted to have emergency comms lasting 10 years as my goal here.
Hope this inspires others!!!
I use BoxCryptor in combination with DropBox - it automatically encrypts your files locally (including filenames) before they get uploaded. I believe it can also be used on GDrive. It means I don't have to worry about the security of my DropBox account at all; it could be public as long as my encryption passphrase is safe and secure.
I've used dropbox for a couple of years now. I have my local wwwroot folder on it and my visual studio projects, as well as all my docs in progress. Most of the code I am working on is open source anyway, so I'm not really paranoid about security. It's great to be able to open up my laptop and work on stuff I was working on previously on my desktop, all the files I checked out of source control on the other machine are checked out to me too. All works great.
For storing sensitive content, just use Trucrypt to create an encrypted container within your dropbox sync'd folder. It doesn't matter how much you trust or don't trust dropbox or whatever cloudy file service you use then.
I've tried skydrive but just found it unreliable - got fed up of getting on other machine and finding it hadn't sync'd files I needed. Unlike the author of this article, sending large files isn't my primary use - backing up and sync'ing between machines is. So I don't think this new gmail integration is as big deal as he thinks.
This is pretty much my use-case for Dropbox - backing up and sync'ing files between our Mac and Linux machines, and from time to time, sharing large files and folders. Where there's sensitive stuff, I use either an encrypted Truecrypt container, or an EncFS folder with Cryptkeeper (the latter mainly for the Linux boxen).
I mainly like Dropbox because the "infrastructure", including Linux clients, is fairly mature by now and for the most part, it "just works". In particular, because the Dropbox folder is just like any other folder in the filesystem, on Linux and Mac you can do things like symlinking to and from the folder, and Dropbox works on them.
Not that I'm ignoring Google Drive - I've been using it since the Docs days - and I'm sure there'll be a reasonable Linux client in the end (an official GD FUSE filesystem driver from Google would do nicely), but for now Dropbox does the job for me. I may well end up using the "Gmail large files from Drive" option in future - it's nice to have choices!
(BTW: I found that Otixo provides a useful "unite your cloud storage accounts" service - especially as they make all your cloud accounts accessible via a single WebDAV share. I use this to give my Raspberry Pi access to my Dropbox, GDrive, etc., using the davfs2 WebDAV FUSE driver to mount Otixo's WebDAV share into the Pi's filesystem. Very handy.)
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