121–130 of 413 posts
I don't know about Americans, but I hope Europeans are staying as far away from American clouds as possible. At least for government use, using non-open source American software should be considered a "national security risk" at this point, with no exaggeration.
What are some non-American & reliable cloud companies?
Jottacloud (Norway) is vaguely like Dropbox.
Exoscale (Switzerland) is roughly analogous to AWS.
I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time? Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet. Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are…
Google is about as likely to shut off Google Drive as it is to shut off it's search engine.
Single biggest shortcoming about Google Drive in an enterprise environment: There's no option to download an entire folder from a shared (public) link. We use Google Apps but not all of our customers / partners / contractors do, and some large collections of shared files need to be downloaded and not simply viewed on a public webpage.
To download a file you've created, you have to choose the public file format you want to export it to, don't you? Isn't that the only way to get them out the Gdrive lobster pot? If you let other people export your files, how do you know what they're going to look like? Do you do test downloads first? (Forgive the ignorance. I gave up on Gdrive very quickly when I saw what it did to Microsoft Ofice documents....)
The issue is sharing, say, a folder of PDFs or images with someone who doesn't have a Google account or one associated with their employer. They can view the entire collection and even download individual files in it piecemeal. They cannot download the entire folder as one can with Dropbox, Box, et al.
I'm sure they do this to save on bandwidth and to push Drive adoption & account sign-ups, but it's very inconvenient for commercial use, especially when it's possible to do on free tiers of other competing services.
So they finally got prices below where they were almost two years ago [1]. Still very yay and that's a great deal, but I'll keep my legacy $5/year plan. [1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/04/24/google-storage-price...
I see two problems with massive offsite storage such as Google Drive 1 TB. First, although $120/year may be quite cheap in the world of cloud storage, hardware's cheap. You can buy a 2-TB external hard drive for less than $120. 1-TB drives are going for $60-$70 now. So why pay rent when you can own? Buy a couple of 1-TB drives every year, copy your stuff onto both, and store one at a relative's house in another city.…
Also, if you are that concerned about the NSA, you would be encrypting your data before you send it up anywhere anyways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Download and then uploading a terabyte of data can be very expensive depending on where you live Dropbox doesn't have a 1TB plan, but 2x500GB costs $1000/year. On Drive, it costs $100/year. That's a difference of $900/year. I don't know where you live, but around here $900/year buys you a pretty fucking good connection, with blackjack and hookers included. it can also take a very long time. So what? You can still use…
I live in the Bay Area and I pay about $800/year for 120KB/s upload (AT&T U-Verse). Certainly no blackjack and hookers included.
Severely.
I won't go near Google Drive until they fix some serious longstanding issues with the desktop client. The two that caused me to abandon Google Drive (I even have a free TB for 3 years from my Chromebook Pixel): 1. No way to re-sync existing folders on your computer (seriously). I was pushing hundreds of GBs of photos to my Google Drive, and after syncing everything, upgraded to a new computer (the files were stored o…
I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time? Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet. Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are…
On the other hand your worry, while justified, does not apply to Google Drive. Google Drive is now an integral part of:
- GMail
- Google Apps
- Android
- Chromebook
- Google+
With Google Cloud the only thing I don't trust long term is their pricing - they have a history of releasing cheap or free stuff, earn popularity, earn users, after which they realize that their costs are greater than their earnings and raise those prices. Examples: Google App Engine and Google Apps.
In regards to DropBox, I support them but they really do need to reduce the pricing for those paid accounts. Pretty soon I'll need more than 100 GB and paying $19.99 per month for 200 GB is a little too expensive already, given that after a while I'll need more than 200 GB and then for 500 GB I'll need to pay $50 / month and that's way too much, when Google's 1 TB offer is for $10 / month and would last me for 2-3 years at least.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. As a counterpoint to that, Dropbox might not exist in 5 years. Google most likely will. Basically, there is no answer here that guarantees the future of your cloud storage. It's useful to access your files from multiple locations, but using it for long term file archival seems like asking for disappointment (as well as being a neat way of throwing money into the sky).
Dropbox is profitable yeah? Why wouldn't they be around in 5 years? Google's prices are so much cheaper than Dropbox, but the ease of use with Dropbox, and the fact that I have my families devices and computers already set up probably means I wont ever switch. I take a picture with my phone? It's on dropbox. My wife takes a picture? It's on dropbox. I take a screenshot on my PC? It's on dropbox. I even wrote a little…
I won't go near Google Drive until they fix some serious longstanding issues with the desktop client. The two that caused me to abandon Google Drive (I even have a free TB for 3 years from my Chromebook Pixel): 1. No way to re-sync existing folders on your computer (seriously). I was pushing hundreds of GBs of photos to my Google Drive, and after syncing everything, upgraded to a new computer (the files were stored o…