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Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

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Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#41
post #29
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should I worry about my privacy if I use this "free" service You should always worry about your privacy. Paid service or not. Google makes its money building a profile about what it knows about you. In the light of placing files there, make of that what you will.

Yes, I think you're right. I guess my feeling is that I would rather pay for the service. That way I am the customer, I'm not the product.

I've read that google's main goal for these free products is to increase the amount of time people spend online and not to monetize every bit of information that they come across. The more time people spend online, the more people see adsense ads. That's why Chrome and Android aren't spying on people's browsing habits like they technically could be, for example.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#42
post #25

eh. 5Gb? Skydrive has like 25

Skydrive is a sad joke that points out how many easy opportunities Microsoft has to leap frog Android and iCloud. They already have a huge cloud platform. They are have millions of Live users. They're finally integrating Live accounts as Windows accounts. They refuse to add dropbox like functionality to SkyDrive to make it possible to just have a set of files synced between all Windows (8, specifically) and WP device…

Uh, they have a dropbox-like client coming out soon. Also, I far prefer their web interface to dropbox's. I see no reason to continue using dropbox once skydrive client comes out.

...unless you're on linux :)

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#43
post #25

eh. 5Gb? Skydrive has like 25

Skydrive is a sad joke that points out how many easy opportunities Microsoft has to leap frog Android and iCloud. They already have a huge cloud platform. They are have millions of Live users. They're finally integrating Live accounts as Windows accounts. They refuse to add dropbox like functionality to SkyDrive to make it possible to just have a set of files synced between all Windows (8, specifically) and WP device…

How about "it's just not out yet"? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/20/connecting-you...

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#44

My ideal storage solution would be one where I'm not restricted to syncing my own local data. I want to be able to upload it to the cloud then delete it from my HD. This is the mentality I'm used to from Gmail. Everything is archived online and I don't need a local copy. This would surely tie in with the thinking behind the Chromebook?

> Everything is archived online and I don't need a local copy. Even with Gmail, I hope you have a second copy of your data somewhere. You never know when your account might just disappear.

I think these concerns are vastly overstated, TBQH. The great majority of people seem to have no such issue with their accounts disappearing.

It's one of those exceedingly rare but potentially catastrophic things, kind of like a nuclear reactor meltdown or being struck by lightning.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#45
In terms of the business side of this, I think many people are missing the potential Google has with integrating this into Google Apps. A very, very large number of businesses use Google Apps for email/calendar.The whole enterprise cloud storage market is very crowded right now, and Google would have a huge advantage in terms of having that initial foot in the door.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#46

We worked on a startup product a few months which is currently shelved. It had a file system like interface and simplified moving files between dropbox, amazon S3, google docs and multiple accounts (any one with two dropbox accounts ?). With all this google drive news, its pretty tempting to bring it back to life :)

why not put a raid file system between the free offerings.

you get a larger total size

faster transfers (ha, like my 6Mbit DSL cares =(

and.... redundancy, which solves the 'everyone scared of the cloud' problem.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#47
post #30

I'm hoping this will compel Dropbox to reevaluate their pricing structure. Storage from Google is an order of magnitude cheaper than Dropbox - paid storage starts at $5/year, and for the same $100/year as the cheapest Dropbox account (50GB) you get 8x the capacity.

Or at least offer something in between $0 and $100/yr, like 10 GB for $20/yr and 20 GB for $40/yr (same price per GB as the 50 GB plan).

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#48

I think "free" should be in quotes.

It would be humorous if sometimes when you opened your file in your Gdrive it was a media appropriate file containing an advertisement. Open it in a text editor get a text file ad, open it in an mp3 player get an audio ad, open it in a video viewer get a video ad. Not all the time of course, just now and then.

You get my vote, not because I think that is a good idea at all, but I agree that is about the most hilarious thing. Thats got to be Googles end game.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#50
post #14

My ideal storage solution would be one where I'm not restricted to syncing my own local data. I want to be able to upload it to the cloud then delete it from my HD. This is the mentality I'm used to from Gmail. Everything is archived online and I don't need a local copy. This would surely tie in with the thinking behind the Chromebook?

Although it's obviously limited to media files, iTunes Match has probably the most elegant solution to the problem. CrashPlan is also doing a great job for backups via constant syncing with the cloud.

Backblaze works well, too. I never buy anything from Apple, is Match more elegant than Amazon's Cloud Player / Drive?
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