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Save more with Google Drive

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Re: Save more with Google Drive

#171

Post by rsync »

simonsarris wrote: post #9

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…

We (rsync.net) appreciate your reasoning.

We've been doing this since 2001. Email us about our HN discount.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#172

Post by dperfect »

derefr wrote: post #164
zacwest wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big client issue for me is the bandwidth usage. Google Drive has no intelligent throttling, so it consumes your entire upload pipe, which makes other apps unusable. This is not really what I want a background service to do.

I actually get annoyed when Dropbox doesn't consume my entire upload pipe. 90% of what I use Dropbox for is stuffing files in my Public folder and getting a URL from them, and that's a synchronous action--I can't do anything until I have the URL. So it should use all the bandwidth it can.

I think the point is that it should be user-configurable. Most of the competitors' desktop clients (including Dropbox) have a setting for that, so you can choose what suits your needs.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#173

Post by SonicSoul »

simonsarris wrote: post #9

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…

You still own your files. If they shut down just get another service and check them in there ? If you don't have local copies it's a risk regardless of who you go with.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#174

Post by drglitch »

simonsarris wrote: post #9

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…

What good alternatives exist to Google/Yahoo finance? Anything specific to recommend?

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#175

Post by d0ugie »

Here's one more alternative to consider (not necessarily cost effective, but all the features in the world), get yourself an unmanaged VPS from a reputable ISP (me, I like http://cloud9.net), or a dedicated machine if you've got the dough, pay up for however much space and redundancy and horsepower and bandwidth you want.

Then you can access your files not just through some sort of third party client or web interface but over SFTP or SMB on a VPN you could configure. Or some web interface, I'm sure there are plenty in every language I can think of. Like a custom rom for your Android phone? Show your appreciation and make the developer an account on your system and let him mirror his most recent few builds.

Make websites, start a little business, learn how to implement SPDY, SSL, HSTS, PFS, learn how to migrate a bunch of sites from Apache to NGINX, grab pyloris.py and learn python, figure out how to use iptables, learn for yourself if vi is better than emacs, learn how to generate a web certificate, configure different databases, learn the hard way why you shouldn't run the likes of phpmyadmin and so on.

That's all quite valuable to offset the cost ineffectiveness of going this route for quasi-cloud storage. On the other hand, 1TB for $9.99 ain't bad... so get both and maybe find or write some python script that syncs up your Google Drive to your VPS, bam!

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#176

Post by jafaku »

mburns wrote: post #55
simonsarris wrote: post #9

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…

I know Google will exist in 5 years. How can you be sure Dropbox (an unprotifable startup) will be?

Unprofitable? Really? It's one of the most successful (if not the most successful one?) Y combinator companies (it's not a startup anymore). PG said it was a black swan. Besides, what do I care whether Google will exist? We are talking about Google Drive, and we know very well it could be gone just like that.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#177

Post by rsync »

kbar13 wrote: post #134

is there a OSX backups solution akin to time machine / arq that takes advantage of google drive?

arq supports, as one of its transport mechanisms, plain old SFTP.

rsync.net, by default, has daily[1] ZFS snapshots enabled on your account. It's basically time machine, but more space efficient since the snapshot "diff'ing" is block based rather than file based.

So a very simple solution would be to arq your data to an HN-reader-discounted rsync.net account, and let our back end do the time-machining.

As a bonus, you can do neat things like this:

  ssh 1234@usw-s001.rsync.net md5 some/file
  mysqldump -u mysql db | ssh 1234@usw-s001.rsync.net "dd of=db_dump"
  ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe
[1] You can specify any time interval, but >7 dailies counts against your quota...

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#178

Post by UVB-76 »

simonsarris wrote: post #9

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…

> I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time?

Feel free to quote me on this: Dropbox will not be Dropbox in five years. It will have been acquired, gone out of business, or at least slipped into irrelevance.

Dropbox does not stand a chance against competitors like Google, Microsoft or Apple.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#179

Post by eropple »

_delirium wrote: post #121
smtddr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some non-American & reliable cloud companies?

Depending on what kind of cloud services you're looking for, Jottacloud (Norway) is vaguely like Dropbox. Exoscale (Switzerland) is roughly analogous to AWS.

Exoscale is much more like Rackspace Cloud than AWS.

Which is unfortunate. A real AWS alternative would be nice.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#180

Post by mb_72 »

abalone wrote: post #157
simonsarris wrote: post #9

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…

It is a bit scaremongery because if you're using it for backup you can just switch to another service if they announce its pending retirement. It's an inconvenience for sure, but not truly a significant reason to not go with Google. Besides, who knows where Dropbox or anyone else will be in 5 years. In 5 years they'll need to be turning a profit which could have a major impact on product and pricing, especially for t…

Not to mention 'Drive' / file storage is a much more fundamental and 'core' service than those Google has shut down.
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