Google GDrive: Coming Soon

[Ralf Maximus]

From Wired news comes an update on the near-mythological GDrive service:

http://blog.wired.co...the-fabled-gdri.html



Not to be confused with GMail Drive, GDrive will be the officially sanctioned humungous drive-in-the-sky that Google hopes will become your main shared repository of offline data.  The rumored client software (code name Platypus) adds a GDrive icon to your My Computer for simple access; data-save speeds are stated to be as fast as local storage.

Naturally, there will be an open API with encouragement for 3rd party add-ons and whatnot.  Google's pricing strategy is murky, but one thing is certain: a basic GDrive account will be free and if you want more, you'll pay. 

Privacy and security issues aside, will this be a good thing?  For the vast majority of everyday users, the ones for whom internet storage is a mysterious concept, yes.  Give them a brainless interface and a few gigabytes of magic storage and you'll be hard pressed to find people without a GDrive icon.

Will file sharing be permitted?  Do polar bears make yellow snow?  Of COURSE it will be... which will poke the entertainment industry with an even sharper stick.  It'll be interesting to see what kind of fury will be unleashed, with Google being the 6000 pound gorilla and all.  Nobody wants to piss off Google:  "Okay, Sony, here's the deal... we'll restore all your search engine links if you drop your lawsuit."

And what'll the fallout be for Microsoft and anyone else eyeing the offline storage market?  Is this good old fashioned competition, or will GDrive be the gun brought to a knife fight?

[Edvard]

Until then, there are still a few services around that will try to steal thunder while they still can.
I wouldn't want to be in competition with Google anytime soon, but here's one that looks like a promising alternative:

Coming soon

Premium Storage Plans
Need more than 50GB of online storage? Soon we will offer competitively priced storage packages to meet all of data storage needs. Check back for updates to our additional storage plans following the beta stage of ADrive.com.

Enhanced Features
We are working hard to deliver the best features for our valued users. Some of the enhanced features that will soon be released include:

Personalized Snapshots
Retrieve older versions of your files using snapshot technology. Schedule your own snapshots to backup and protect your stored data.

ADrive Desktop Client
Upload your files to ADrive directly from your desktop, just drag and drop.

File Sharing
Don’t worry about emailing large attachments anymore with ADrive’s file sharing service.

[cmpm]

I wonder how many gigs will be free?

And if you can hyperlink to the things you put in there.

Xdrive has 5 gigs free, no hyperlinking.
Web interface works better then the xdrive icon deal.
Of course if you want to let someone in,
you gotta give 'em the password.

http://xdrive.com/

[cmpm]

my mistake-you can share files via e-mail with xdrive
setting it up you have to email the ones you want to share with

which can be done with google docs and spreadsheets also

[Ralf Maximus]

And if you can hyperlink to the things you put in there.

-cmpm (November 27, 2007, 11:02 AM)

I linked to everything I had; there's no official GDrive link at the Google website.

[cmpm]

Thanks Ralf for the heads up on this.

I suspect it will be similar to docs and spreadsheets.
And accessed by others via e-mail invitation.
Otherwise you could build a website on it.

[hamradio]

I found out about Adobe SHARE beta earlier.

(Note: 1 GB of storage right now from what I can tell.)

Read help file on there for file formats.

[MrCrispy]

data-save speeds are stated to be as fast as local storage.

I think not ! Not unless google is giving me a new broadband provider thats as fast as my SATA hard disk
And I'm hoping the free storage is closer to 10gb than it is to 2. After all, gmail already gives you 5gb free space and google has to do one better than all the other free storage providers.

[Darwin]

Yeah, not to mention Yahoo going to unlimited online storage for its free mail accounts earlier this year...

[nosh]

Xdrive has 5 gigs free, no hyperlinking.
Web interface works better then the xdrive icon deal.

-cmpm (November 27, 2007, 11:02 AM)

Connecting to Xdrive via their client software was a nightmare when I tried it.

It'll be really nice if GDrive kicks into action soon, what with "forever" hosting solutions like Divshare going on sale. 

[Ralf Maximus]

data-save speeds are stated to be as fast as local storage.

I think not ! Not unless google is giving me a new broadband provider thats as fast as my SATA hard disk

-MrCrispy (November 27, 2007, 01:10 PM)

I'm certain it's some kind of background upload process, so the "save" happens immediately.  Maybe a copy of the file goes into a local cache, and THAT's uploaded (in case you alter or delete the file being uploaded while the upload is in progress).

[MrCrispy]

I hope they don't make a local copy of the file before the actual upload - that doubles the space needed and it could fail. What they SHOULD do is use volume shadow copies in Windows, so that they get copy-on-write semantics and that way I can modify the file and still not lock it for uploading, while not using any extra disk space. But I doubt they will, I've never seen any program outside imaging software use it.

[cmpm]

more info-though not much more

http://online.wsj.co...mod=tff_main_tff_top

[Ralf Maximus]

Oooh!  The article has a nice graph comparing the services.



The chart really needs a "Percent Evil" column though.

[cmpm]

I tried this one and like it!

https://share.adobe.com/adc/login.do

thanks HamRadio