back to article Google G-drive app leak sparks 5GB file vault riddle

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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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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)

    1. Fuzz

      Re: This is news?

      who downvoted you?

      Skydrive is 25GB of free online storage, 5GB of which can be used for live mesh which works in a similar way to dropbox.

      1. Dave's Jubblies

        Re: This is news?

        You don't get it, NOTHING MS do can be considered 'good' on here...

        If you post anything positive about MS, be prepared to be downvoted instantly, and without explanation. Probably with some comment about Windows phone following it up...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Meh

          Re: This is news?

          The problem I have with Microsoft's offering is that despite their larger space headline, you can't upload a file that's bigger than 100MB. Having just used Dropbox to easily share a (legitimately-owned, before you ask) 2GB zip file, skydrive is useless for me.

        2. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This is news?

      Microsoft's offering is platform specific.

      Dropbox is available on pretty much any platform you could imagine (although I doubt they have a Windows Phone client, due to only having about 10 real users).

      1. Spearchucker Jones
        FAIL

        Re: This is news?

        SkyDrive and LiveMesh are not platform specific.

      2. Rob Moir

        Re: This is news?

        If by "platform specific" you mean "computers or mobile devices, rather than on packets of cornflakes" then I suppose you have a point. If you meant something else then its nice to see someone who doesn't let the facts get in the way of their opinion.

        1. LinkOfHyrule
          Joke

          ""...look them up on Bing""

          "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!"

          "Bing goes the weasel!"

          "Don't worry folks, the ambulance is on it's way no thanks to Bing!"

        2. Rampant Spaniel

          IOS Cornflakes

          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.

    3. Wize

      Re: This is news?

      Microsoft have been showing off their wares with product placement on the likes of Hawaii Five-O.

      "...look them up on Bing"

      "I've put it on my Skydrive"

      etc

      1. Law
        Unhappy

        Re: This is news?

        ""...look them up on Bing""

        I've heard "just Bing them" once on a US show. I laughed my ass off, then cried a little when they interrupted the dialogue to show them actually typing in the persons name into Bing.. :'(

      2. frank ly

        Re: This is news?

        ".. product placement on the likes of Hawaii Five-O."

        Bing him Danno!

  2. Lee Dowling Silver badge

    So we're reporting rumours that may have absolutely zero basis in fact, now, are we?

    Well done, Reg.

    Did you even ask Google for their input?

  3. David Nield
    Thumb Up

    Google Docs

    Google Docs is already an excellent online storage vault, and the prices are decent. you can upload hours and hours of video and stream it from the cloud. all that's really missing is desktop sync.

  4. Gordan

    IMAP FUSE FS?

    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)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don't Box.com offer 5G, uprated to 50G?

    Don't Box.com offer 5G, uprated to 50G when you do a first access from an Android device, via the Box.com app?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Re: Don't Box.com offer 5G, uprated to 50G?

      No automatic sync client on Box.com, I have the 50GB, but prefer to use my free 24GB provided by Dropbox. (yes 24GB free, not 2GB).

      1. countd
        Happy

        Re: Don't Box.com offer 5G, uprated to 50G?

        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.

  6. Ed 11

    5GB?

    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.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fingers crossed

    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.

  8. neon1024
    Thumb Up

    I'm sure this will link in with the existing storage and I certainly hope it does, as I pay for Google storage already for Picasa, so I'm looking forward to this, if indeed it is confirmed!

    1. Jim 48
  9. Greg J Preece
    Linux

    No Linux support again, eh?

    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!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No Linux support again, eh?

      Of course there will be a linux client. The bulk of Google's employees don't use Windows or OS X they use their own spinoff of Ubuntu and they are bound to have been testing this internally for quite some time, so it makes sense that there'll be a linux client.

      1. MacroRodent
        Linux

        Re: No Linux support again, eh?

        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.

  10. nichobe
    Happy

    It needs to be larger than 5 GB

    I am up to 20GB free in Dropbox now....

  11. Andre Carneiro

    Giving Google all of my documents?

    Unless there is some form of encryption that means they can't see everything I upload into their sysdtems there is NO WAY i'm ever using this service. Dropbox is bad enough in that respect.

  12. lotus49
    Go

    App support

    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.

  13. Keith Williams

    some text here

    so what's the difference between these offerings and megaupload?

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ubuntu One offers 5 GB for free(tards)

    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).

  15. lotus49
    FAIL

    box.com useless file size limit

    I was just about to sign up for box.com after reading the discussion here until I saw the 25MB file size limit on free accounts - pathetic and useless.

    I'll stick with dropbox thank you very much.

  16. Qdos
    Thumb Down

    5Gb, 25Gb, whatever... today's need can be measured in terrabytes, surely? :o

    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".

    1. Rampant Spaniel
      Devil

      Re: 5Gb, 25Gb, whatever... today's need can be measured in terrabytes, surely? :o

      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.

  17. Share parts of Spreadsheet
    Headmaster

    Alternatives

    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

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