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Save more with Google Drive

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Re: Save more with Google Drive

#311

Post by q2 »

zmmmmm wrote: post #283
q2 wrote: post #117

Implicit expectation of any storage service is, data will remain private and when we remove data from there, it won't exist anywhere on Google systems in any form. Unfortunately, Google terms and conditions says, http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ "When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify…

> How can anyone give license of their personal stuff to third party? How could they possibly operate a service that has as one of its primary features sharing and copying of your content, if you didn't give them a license to do that? This is standard boilerplate for just about any service that accepts user generated content for just about any reason.

If this is the standard boilerplate, then standard needs to be changed :). Why a "pure" storage service needs to do following?

1. "reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."

2. Why they should have data even after we stop using their Services?

Users may want just storage but no integration/lock-in with their services. Google can offer "opt-in/opt-out" mechanism from their services. Is n't it?

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#313

Post by eXpl0it3r »

eslaught wrote: post #238

What I find interesting about this is that the Google Drive is now significantly less expensive than Amazon S3, and even comparable to Amazon Glacier. Google Drive: $10/1000GB = $0.01/GB Amazon S3: $0.85/GB for the first 1 TB Amazon Glacier: $0.01/GB (all prices per month) This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period. Sure, there are caveats. Google Driv…

Amazon S3/Glacier don't just provide some random cloud storage, but availability from specific locations, guaranteed bandwidth/rate, detailed logging, API, etc.

While Google Drive might be an interesting place to just store "some stuff", it's not really comparable for any larger scaled application.

I'm not sure what bandwidth Google Drive provides, but looking at Dropbox, I'd never want to serve any customer with that "crappy" < 1 MiB/s speed. It's okay for all the small changes Dropbox is designed for, but for serving as public storage space, it's not really acceptable.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#314

Post by diminoten »

fletchowns wrote: post #153
diminoten wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting ripped off. Severely.

You say that like I have a choice for my ISP.

You mean like Comcast, Unwired, Sonic, MegaPath, DSL Extreme, Covad, and AT&T?

Yeah, I guess I'd call that "choice".

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#315

Post by mcintyre1994 »

joedevon wrote: post #302

I happily pay for both Box AND Dropbox and this does not in the least entice me. Google made a social contract with the world. It was a bad marketing move to break the contract. Again and again. You'd have to be a fool to trust your data with them today. Because they sell your information let alone that they drop services like this when they get bored. Not sure if anyone thought of this, but some of their products co…

I'm not sure those you refer to as Google breaking a "social contract" with would be better off with a sorta-Google-sorta-startup-reader. It seems like Reader shutting down was great for the startup ecosystem, and they made it really easy for that to happen. I don't know of a compelling argument to choose Reader over that.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#316

Post by dragonwriter »

eslaught wrote: post #238

What I find interesting about this is that the Google Drive is now significantly less expensive than Amazon S3, and even comparable to Amazon Glacier. Google Drive: $10/1000GB = $0.01/GB Amazon S3: $0.85/GB for the first 1 TB Amazon Glacier: $0.01/GB (all prices per month) This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period. Sure, there are caveats. Google Driv…

> What I find interesting about this is that the Google Drive is now significantly less expensive than Amazon S3

Which shouldn't be too surprising, since the (more expensive than Drive) Google product that is more of a direct competitor to S3 (Google Cloud Storage) is still an order of magnitude less expensive than S3 (Cloud Storage is $0.085/GB for the first 1TB.)

EDIT: Well, actually, that's not true; parent's cited prices for S3 were wrong. GCS and S3 are, at least for the first TB, exactly the same price at $0.085/GB.

> This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period.

That depends. With drive you pay for allocated capacity, with S3 don't you pay for actual usage? Depending on the level of overcommit, its possible for less expensive per GB "capacity" priced service to be profitable on top of a more expensive per GB "usage" priced service.

Plus, its at least theoretically possible, especially if a lot of the stored content is not efficiently compressed on its own, that the consumer capacity-priced service could also use compression and/or deduplication to further reduce usage on the usage-priced backend.

> Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3.

Google Drive most assuredly is programmatically accessible via an API.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#317

Post by sroerick »

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…

Google drive is very integral to chromebook use.

If they dropped drive it would mean millions of chromebooks would be made almost useless.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#318

Post by dragonwriter »

gnur wrote: post #273
jafaku wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except for the fact that it is integrated in gmail, google plus, android and probably some other services I forgot. It has generally taken years of neglect for services of Google to be discontinued. Google reader was hardly updated for the last 2 years it existed. This is a service you are paying for, how many payed for services have been discontinued by google?

> Except for the fact that it is integrated in gmail, google plus, android and probably some other services I forgot.

Its central to the "Chrome everywhere" / Chrome web store / Chromebook strategy, and central to Google Apps for Business (both because "Drive" subsumed the office suite that used to be "Docs & Spreadsheets", and because its a platform for second/third-party apps for Apps users.)

But the Drive desktop sync application is pretty peripheral to any of those things that provide confidence that Drive itself will hang around for a long time -- so if people are thinking of Drive primarily as a desktop sync solution and worrying that Google might cancel that, well, that's probably not as unlikely as the idea that Google is likely to cancel Drive itself anytime in the forseeable future.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#319

Post by zmmmmm »

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's silly to worry about the risk of Google abandoning something as strategically important to them as Drive, when there's an infinitely greater risk of you losing all your storage because your account gets disabled. This is something that happens infrequently but still routinely, and for sometimes quite innocent reasons, with rather little recourse in the case it was a mistake on Google's part (let alone for the case where there's a legitimate reason they blocked your account).

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#320

Post by Guillaume86 »

dperfect wrote: post #67

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 didn't used GDrive enough to see your problems but for me, the missing "right clic" -> "copy public link" to get a DIRECT link on a public file is what's stopping me from even considering it as an alternative to Dropbox.
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