Introducing Google Drive... yes, really • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#441

Post by nessus42 » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 4:14 AM UTC

philp wrote: post #416

nessus42 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, I hope that Google Drive doesn't start following symlinks. That behavior of Dropbox is completely broken and dangerous, and furthermore makes it impossible to use symbolic links for what they're supposed to be used for. When symlinks are synced, they should be copied "opaquely", not "transparently". I.e., the link itself should be synced, not what the link points to. Opaque syncing of symlinks is the standard wa…

Tragic indeed. May the deities hear your outcry! Do you have any helpful suggestions on how to solve this problem by other means? I found the symlink solution to be quite elegant and never experienced any unexpected behavior.

> Do you have any helpful suggestions on how to solve this problem by other means?

As others have mentioned, do the symlinks in the other direction. Or lobby Google to provide explicit configuration for syncing multiple folders.

> I found the symlink solution to be quite elegant and never experienced any unexpected behavior.

It's anything but elegant! What happens, for instance if you drag and drop a folder into your synced folder, and unbeknownst to you this folder has a symlink in it to the root directory of the computer? Nothing good can happen, I assure you, if symlinks are synced transparently!

Additionally, I already heavily use symlinks for their intended purpose. E.g., I have lots of symlinks between files and folders to make it easier for me to find and navigate all my stuff. What happens if I want to have my folder "my-lifes-work", which is already a twisty maze of files, folders, and symlinks, and I want it synced between all my computers? If symlinks are synced opaquely, no problem: I just drop this into the synced folder, and everything is golden. If I drop this into a folder where links are synced transparently, who knows what hellish things result.

Maybe you think that Google shouldn't give a rat's ass about the needs of fellows such as myself, since I'm not in the mainstream, but symlinks were invented for people such as me. Not for programs to hijack for completely different purposes.

I actually did drop "my-lifes-work" into my Windows Live Mesh folder. Live Mesh is a lot like Dropbox and Google Drive. This actually works fine because Live Mesh ignores the symlinks. I.e., if A is my original computer which has the symlinks, and B is my second computer which didn't have "my-lifes-work" on before now, then after syncing, B ends up with everything that A has, only without the symlinks. This is okay for me, since I wrote a program to sync the symlinks out of band. This is less that ideal, but it's better than nothing.

Oh, for the day, when stuff such as this will just work the way that the gods intended it to!

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#442

Post by rdl » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 4:16 AM UTC

sakai wrote: post #243

kruipen wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dropbox presumably pays for s3 slightly less or slightly more (depending on redundancy level) than goog end user price: Over 5000 TB / month $0.055 per GB $0.037 per GB

Well, they're doing pretty heavy de-duping, but point well taken.

The de-duping is certainly more than the discount off list price, too -- I suspect they de-dupe 10-100x. I really doubt their discount off the lowest public S3 volume price is more than 50%.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#443

Post by rkudeshi » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 4:17 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #34

Anyone know if this is the original Google Drive they wrote all those years ago and never launched, or a new thing they reused the name for?

Found an official answer[1]:

Is there continuity with previous Google Drive products?

Pichai: What Scott’s talking about, Google Drive as an evolution of Docs, is one thing. Early on, we had a project called Google Drive that was completely different.

What was different?

Pichai: There was a very traditional file system approach, a long time ago, having nothing to do with Google Docs. It was pre-mobile, pre-tablet, with deep integration into My Documents and Windows, et cetera. So it was very different.

[1] https://allthingsd.com/20120424/sundar-pichai-google-drive-i...

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#444

Post by drewjoh » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 4:20 AM UTC

alberth wrote: post #364

Question... Does the "GDrive for Businesses" not allow for a shared corporate folder? https://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/products.htm... This seems odd because if you're a business, that would exactly be your need. I hope I'm wrong, otherwise I'll continue to use my Dropbox for Teams. https://www.dropbox.com/teams

You can share folders between users in a Google Apps account. You just have to pay for each user to have the needed space to store the folder(s).

If you're thinking along the lines of "buy 100GB for all 20 users in my account to share for $5/month"... then no. You can't do that.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#445

Post by tlb » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 4:22 AM UTC

rdl wrote: post #442

sakai wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they're doing pretty heavy de-duping, but point well taken.

The de-duping is certainly more than the discount off list price, too -- I suspect they de-dupe 10-100x. I really doubt their discount off the lowest public S3 volume price is more than 50%.

Personal photos take up a large fraction of people's cloud storage, and they are completely non-de-dupable. I doubt it's possible to get more than 3x on average.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#446

Post by brainless » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 4:25 AM UTC

Will Google Drive Apps be limited to Chrome? Can anyone confirm if there is any way to run them on other browsers?

If not, then popularity of Drive Apps mean will make other browsers become less useful. There are many SMBs or individuals who would probably shift to Drive Apps for many day to day tasks and use mostly Chrome for that.

This clearly mentions only Chrome: https://developers.google.com/drive/apps_overview#installing...

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#447

Post by el_presidente » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 5:01 AM UTC

jwmerrill wrote: post #261

teraflop wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of disingenuous for them to call it an "open platform" when the only way to get API access is to distribute your app through the Chrome Web Store. What if I want to build something that works on multiple browsers? Am I just out of luck?

You actually can get access to these apps in other browsers through the Chrome Web Store. Try adding any of the Drive enabled apps. The experience is a little odd right now, but it works.

I get a big scary message telling me that most apps won't work without Chrome.

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#448

Post by josscrowcroft » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 5:07 AM UTC

tlb wrote: post #445

rdl wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The de-duping is certainly more than the discount off list price, too -- I suspect they de-dupe 10-100x. I really doubt their discount off the lowest public S3 volume price is more than 50%.

Personal photos take up a large fraction of people's cloud storage, and they are completely non-de-dupable. I doubt it's possible to get more than 3x on average.

[citation needed]

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#449

Post by robomartin » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 5:21 AM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #414

Things I'd like to see before I consider using or recommending GDrive: - A statement from Google regarding whether or not they will scan the data and files in GDrive to develop further profiling information or other data about the user - A guarantee from Google that GDrive will not be subject to account lockout in the event of account suspension due to AdWords/AdSense algorithmic (or human) triggers. In fact, I'd wan…

Sorry, this is what the first link should have been:

Why I feel this way (from about a week ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3849318

Re: Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

#450

Post by apu » Wed, Apr 25, 2012, 5:55 AM UTC

josscrowcroft wrote: post #448

tlb wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal photos take up a large fraction of people's cloud storage, and they are completely non-de-dupable. I doubt it's possible to get more than 3x on average.

[citation needed]

For which part? That photos take most of the space? Or that they're virtually un-de-dupable?

I'm fairly sure about the former (having seen some private numbers that I'm not allowed to share) -- although you can think through it yourself. What other kind of data is as easily and commonly produced as photos/videos and takes up so much space?

The latter is definitely true since it's a hard research problem that I've spent some time thinking about myself. There are approaches to lossy-de-duplication of photos that can achieve some significant savings, but the quality loss is too great to be useful at the moment.