Could someone please ELI5 how Google Drive doesn't include text files toward usage?
These aren't text files, but Google Docs files, which Google doesn't count against an account's quota.
Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
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Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#32Base85 would probably be a better choice for storing binary as text, since it has a ratio of 5:4 instead of 4:3. On the topic of "unusual and free large file hosting", YouTube would probably be the largest, although you'd need to find a resilient way of encoding the data since their re-encoding processes are lossy. I like the "Linux ISO" and "1337 Docs" references ;-)
Here is an implementation of arbitrary data storage using YouTube videos: https://github.com/dzhang314/YouTubeDrive
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#33Could someone please ELI5 how Google Drive doesn't include text files toward usage?
These aren't text files, but Google Docs files, which Google doesn't count against an account's quota.
OK, I did see that.
But I don't understand why Google would do that. For most users, aren't Google Docs files a substantial part of their usage? Or do people mainly store backups?
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#34You could do the same thing with QR codes in Google Photos, the compression required for unlimited storage wouldn't affect them.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
These aren't text files, but Google Docs files, which Google doesn't count against an account's quota.
OK, I did see that. But I don't understand why Google would do that. For most users, aren't Google Docs files a substantial part of their usage? Or do people mainly store backups?
FTA "A single google doc can store about a million characters. This is around 710KB of base64 encoded data."
This means that in order to reach the limit of the drive space given away for free, they'd need something like 15,000 Google Doc files (15GB) if they counted toward your space limit. I doubt a lot of paying customers even reach that.
The real limit (file size) is reached by binaries. Videos and PDFs, usually.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#36Very cool! About a year ago I had a similar idea, but to store arbitrary data in PNG chunks[1] and upload them to "unlimited" image hosts like IMGUR and Reddit.
[1] http://blog.brian.jp/python/png/2016/07/07/file-fun-with-pyh...
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#37Anyone remember Gdrive? I can’t find it now, but I think it was probably early or mid 2000s. It let you store files as a local disk (FUSE) via Gmail attachments.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
These aren't text files, but Google Docs files, which Google doesn't count against an account's quota.
OK, I did see that. But I don't understand why Google would do that. For most users, aren't Google Docs files a substantial part of their usage? Or do people mainly store backups?
Simple, Google wants to encourage people to use their office suite so they indirectly subsidise it in this way.
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#39This is very clever, and a neat interface.
On the one hand, I think this is great, on the other, I hope it doesn't force google to add limits that bother me in the future :P
Re: Unlimited Google Drive storage by splitting binary files into base64
#40Anyone remember Gdrive? I can’t find it now, but I think it was probably early or mid 2000s. It let you store files as a local disk (FUSE) via Gmail attachments.
I remember using it back in 2005 iirc, and it was amazing. The files had a label called gmailfs.gDisk which is how it could keep the "file system" separate from the rest.
Now Google generously offers Drive with 15Gigs of space.