This is news?
MS have been offering Skydrive 5gb for sometime now.
With Win7 you can easily set up file syncing using Live Mesh (also availble in a fashion on Andriod)
Scads of rumours are belting through the internet regarding Google's supposed entry into online file storage and sharing next week - giving the likes of Dropbox a heart attack in the process. Techcrunch got its hands on a Google Drive OS X app, although it's useless at the moment. A Google systems blog suggested Google Drive …
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"Can you lot shut the eff up please! ....I'm trying to Bing in here!"
"Miss, it's bad news I'm afraid. Your husband is into Bing!"
"Oi mate, can you Bing the train times for me? No I said Bing! What are you death?"
"The Register is a tech news site for 9-12 year-olds. Says so right on Bing, bitch!"
"Urm yes, police please. My neighbour is acting suspiciously......I overheard him saying he wanted to Bing himself!"
"I'm afraid you have tested positive for Bing!"
"It's not what you know, but who you Bing!"
"Sorry I'm late honey, I got Binged pretty bad on the freeway!"
"And I was all like - dude please, that is so 2008, and she was all like - duh, it was on Bing!"
"And this court finds you guilty of all charges. You are sentenced to twelve years hard Bing!"
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MS Cornflakes - all grey in colour, surprisingly tasty, vastly underrated, only bought by about 6 normal consumers a year, forced on millions of workers.
IOS Cornflakes - individually crushed under the feet of Chinese infant workers, nibbled into a uniform shape and size. Box designed by a team of 160 phd's to give the optimal opening experience. Can only be eaten from an ibowl and you have to take the spoon back to the store to be cleaned each time.
Android Cornflakes - Every few minutes the box vibrates and all the cornflakes fall out the bottom.
BEOS Cornflakes - We all heard about them once, but how many people actually tried them? A passing fad like tab clear.
The more technical and UNIX minded among us have had a feature for unlimited cloud storage for ages anyway. From top to bottom, the stack looks something like this:
MHDDFS (to merge multiple instances for truly unlimited storage)
(optional) GlusterFS to add redundancy just in case some of the accounts get deleted
EncFS (because you shouldn't put your files unencrypted into the cloud)
IMAP FUSE FS driver (there are several)
Free email account that supports IMAP (e.g. gmail)
Yes, box.{com,net} is somewhat crippled without the client, for which you need a paid account. However, you can use davfs2 to mount a folder and sync it that way, which works brilliantly and gives me a good use of that 50GB account I got for signing up on Android.
Google effectively reinvented free web-based email when they launched Gmail. 1GB of storage, at the time, was an epic offering.
They are clearly losing their mojo if the mythical G-drive launches with a frankly pathetic 5GB. It would be miles off being a market leading proposition. I'll pass.
Fingers crossed Google don't drop the ball on this one and integrate it into Android 5.0 and the next incarnation of GoogleChromeOS as this could be a real killer feature. However some of their more recent decisions and products have been very half baked, so who knows what they'll do with this.
Assuming these rumours are true, I would expect better from Google of all people. Half the stuff they make is based on Linux, as is a massive chunk of their infrastructure. The Android SDK has an official Linux release, Android itself is Linux-based, as are Chromebooks, etc, etc, etc.
Make a chuffin' *nix client!
It would be just great if no new Linux client would even be needed. If they used DAV, Linux and other OS'es could connect to it out of the box. Even offering it as a normal Windows share would be usable, especially if Google offered it with the Unix extensions (like Samba does), so that all normal Linux file system features would work seamlessly on it. That's actually a service I would be willing to pay for, a true cloud drive for Linux.
Although there are security concerns with Dropbox (the data isn't encrypted and Dropbox staff are able - but not permitted - to access it) one big plus is the level of application support.
In my experience, Dropbox is the most widely supported cloud storage solution in both IOS and Android applications. So far I have only seen one app support box.com and none that support any of the others. In short, that's why I use it.
I've used it on my Android phone, Windows and Linux machine and it worked well. Looks like there are apps for other platforms such as iPhone and Mac, too. The only thing that annoyed me was that it would refuse uploading videos from the phone.
Their explanation was that they hadn't yet sorted out continuing an interrupted download and so refrained from large files. A recent entry on askubuntu appears to suggest that's been sorted since though.
Anyway, it didn't matter much because Google kept automatically uploading my photos and videos into some private area on Google+, an apparently massive amount of online storage I never knew I had (yet much appreciate).
Can't understand the fuss. I need 5Tb and get it from Livedrive for a measly sum compared to Amazon & Co, no bandwidth charges, and it even works with SyncBackPro (yeah, PITA to set up, but once you have it right you will get around the clock backup without having to maintain anything like 5Tb in local hard drives for mirroring...)
Encryption? I'd want it handled locally. Certainly not in "the Cloud".
uh huh, and who does livedrive get their storage from? Most 'cloud' backup solutions use amazon. A couple like Backblake or Bqbackup roll their own but most (again backblaze is the exception) that roll their own are not unlimited.
The bottom line is there is a per gig per month charge somewhere in the supply chain, heavy use of an 'unlimited' solution will see you terminated or throttled which renders the service useless. Once you pass a certain threshold you cost them money each month. There is no other revenue stream (as smugmug has print sales) and once the average usage rises higher than the cost their profit just became a loss and the heavy users get tossed. 5TB at amazons lowest listed price is 5000x3.7c a month = $185 a month. How long you think you will be able to pay $7.95 for $185 worth of product :)
I am a photographer, I shoot a few tb a year, nothing crazy by current standards and nothing compared to the video guys but raws and mf scans add up. I did try an unlimited service, it too two years to backup (literally) and when I had a primary drive failure the only restore option was buying insanely overpriced external drives from them and having them shipped because it was my primary drive and their system wouldn't recognise the replacement drive as being the same system and they wouldn't do a selective restore yadda yadda pay here. Even then a full restore process would have taken a while (16TB @10mbps = approx 149 days or something similar?). The cloud is great for keeping your docs folder synced across multiple devices. It's even ok for something like smugmug (although I have long been using more than I pay for and effectively costing them money each month) but for a significant amount of valuable data, unless you pay per gig you are risking a nasty accident. I just backup to multiple external drives and leave them in secure locations (along with the original raid 10 array'd copy). Once a year I ensure all the backup drives are ok.
I hope these are not mere rumors. I have been waiting for Google drive since a long time now. Interesting news that Google is offering 5 GB of online storage which comparatively lil less with what Box is offering 50GB for android users. Meanwhile found some interesting tools for cloud storage. Tools such as CollateBox http://www.collatebox.com/ are very promising, went through their blogs http://blog.collatebox.com they are edifying