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Save more with Google Drive

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221–230 of 413 posts

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#222
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a choice - it is better to place your bet with the company whose main business line depends on the service you are using. Google has a long history of dropping services, because it can. It does not matter to Google that 10k people or 100k people find that particular service useful. Google is not about to drop search and search related ads any time soon - storage services it could drop tomorrow and not car…

If there is a choice - it is better to place your bet with the company whose main business line depends on the service you are using. I don't see how that's a hard and fast rule. File storage is Dropbox's only business line - if it fails, they're gone. If it helps their other concerns (Gmail, Google Apps) Google can prop up Drive even if its unprofitable.

Gmail and Apps are at best minor contributors to Google's bottom line. If faith in Drive is based on its contribution to them, that Is little reason for that faith to be strong.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#224
My feeling towards google drive has always been... meh. But this is pretty exciting, mostly because dropbox will have to react and this will mean that whatever service on dropbox I am engaged in will soon get better by some order of magnitude... hopefully.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#225
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to enter the Google v Dropbox argument, but with data caps, it's easy to slowly build up a lot of backed up data that you cannot really retrieve all at once.

Not to enter that argument either, but whatever cloud storage service you use, you should be storing your data there as well as on at least one local hard disk, not instead of .

That's likely why Google and Dropbox both offer "Sync"-style functionality, as do iCloud and OneDrive. It's on your disk plus in the cloud.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#226
post #46

I use Google Drive and the new price seems quite nice to me. That being said, I find the web interface for Drive to be awful. What I want is for the web-interface to be more "desktop-like". For example, * It's difficult to select multiple disparate files * you have limited options on how to sort your files * If you search for a file, it's difficult to open up the enclosing directory (at least I can't figure it out) *…

Google Drive's web interface is already vastly superior to Dropbox. They also support direct linking from drive file to custom file types for web apps.

If anything, it's their desktop interface that is not as good as Dropbox.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#227

Dropbox is $9.99 for 100GB for comparison. Drive still doesn't have a Linux Client.

I use InSync (https://www.insynchq.com/) as a linux GDrive client and although I'm very happy with it I do expect Google to release a native Linux client if I ever pay for their storage.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#228

per month? That's $120/year, or $360 for 3 years. I think you can buy a couple of 3 TB hard drives for that.

This is still not practical for my use. It is a bit like Lease vs Buy for automobiles IMO.

I recently bought 2x2tb drives for $75 each and a 2 bay Synology NAS for $150. Now I have redundancy (mirroring), online access, much faster access to my data, faster backups, And it was dead simple to setup and configure (web based configuration tool, and tool-less hardware).

Best of all the data is not subject to surveillance and pilfering.

It will take around 15 months before I will break even for my investment (vs Google drive prices), but I believe that it was worth the small amount of extra time spent and the up front spending.

Thoughts anyone?

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#229
post #193
post #28

It nags me that even at this great price I'm not jumping up and down to switch from Dropbox. Why is this? -- Once you start using Dropbox there are some serious network effects. It takes a lot of work to get all your friends (both work and personal) to move. -- Even though Google Drive is so much cheaper it just doesn't seem to have the usability of Dropbox. I find the web interface really hard to use for some reason…

Serious - how are friends involved with dropbox ? Now I'm a (traditional?) dropbox user, using dropbox as a synchronized folder between various computers combined with a remote backup. All I would need to do to transfer is send a few links to people to my new shared stuff (folder / album ) My only technical issue with transfer is actually transferring the file from Dropbox to Google ( 1 MBps upload ) and getting all…

Small use case to address your first question, but that I used all the time in school (and occasionally now at work): because everyone had the Dropbox client installed we would just create a shared folder that we'd all contribute to. Maybe only a couple of people ever had the Google sync client installed, and it was a lot more friction to upload/download files all the time.

On the converse, whenever we collaborated on an actual text document or presentation, we'd turn to Google Docs to do it, then when finished convert it into Word/PPT and stick it in Dropbox.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#230
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dropbox is profitable yeah? Why wouldn't they be around in 5 years? Google's prices are so much cheaper than Dropbox You just answered your own question. Dropbox is convenient because you've already installed it everywhere. Google Drive is already on your Android phone and in your e-mail inbox.

I think that's actually part of the problem, I think of Google Drive as where I put attachments from email, not files and folder on my computer.

I can't put my finger on it but Drive just seems clunky, especially with the GMail / Docs integration.

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