Google: no escape!

[SteveRiley]

http://drive.google.com

Something's there, because this ain't no normal 404...





Planning for the onslaught of crawlers...



And will absolutely blow everyone else out of the water...who can compete with these prices?

[dibl]

Wow!

Although, with 4 e-mail accounts, I could get the 20GB for free on U1, I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to avoid $5 per year. That really is astonishing.

[james147]

Not to mention that this storage is used up after the free storage and is shared between all the google apps so can be used for photos or email (not that I am anywhere near the 7gig of email storage) or documents.

[GreyGeek]

They plan to gross only $250 on a Terabyte of disk space! Or, $256 if one uses an entire Terabyte!

What do you suppose will the prices be after UbuntuOne, DropBox, Rackspace and all the other Internet storage services drop out?

[Snowhog]

My 1TB external USB Seagate Expansion cost me less than $100.00.

I'm just not ready to trust anything of mine to an external 'enterprise' storage site.

[SteveRiley]

I hate having to take care of my data by myself. Hard drives go soft, houses burn down, too risky. I'd much rather put my data someplace where I know every object is stored redundantly, continually checked for degradation or bit-rot, and even automatically versioned.

I'm seriously considering running an instance of OwnCloud on Amazon Web Services. Possibly even getting my own domain and using the instance for email, too.

[SteveRiley]

Aarrrrgghrrrrraaarrrrrrrhhhhgggggghhhhhh11111! Look what showed up in Rekonq today...

[GreyGeek]

I hate having to take care of my data by myself. Hard drives go soft, houses burn down, too risky. I'd much rather put my data someplace where I know every object is stored redundantly, continually checked for degradation or bit-rot, and even automatically versioned.

I'm seriously considering running an instance of OwnCloud on Amazon Web Services. Possibly even getting my own domain and using the instance for email, too.

mmm... you've started me thinking along those lines as well...

[vw72]

So what happens when Google decides they want out of the drive business, like they have with a number of other Google products? Or what happens if the US Gov't shuts them down because of questionable content like they did to Megaupload. Finally, what is the fine print as to Google farming your content, like they do with gmail, calendar, and their other services -- there has to be a way for them to make a profit when they are basically giving away the storage for next to free.

Personally, I like the owncloud solution, too.

[james147]

So what happens when Google decides they want out of the drive business, like they have with a number of other Google products?

Most, if not all the of google projects that where shut down where ones that weren't being used for a while after they where released... the google storage doesn't fall into this category.

Or what happens if the US Gov't shuts them down because of questionable content like they did to Megaupload.

Megaupload was used for distributing pirated content, almost exclusively and they where brought down because they weren't making a big enough effort to remove copyrighted material (one of the reasons they lost the trial was because emails where found to suggest that the megaupload team fully know and was complicit in the distribution of pirated material). This is hardly the case for googles storage.

Finally, what is the fine print as to Google farming your content, like they do with gmail, calendar, and their other services -- there has to be a way for them to make a profit when they are basically giving away the storage for next to free.

I think they make most of their money for it from the google apps for business, the fact the basically give away storage to the normal users is so that more people are familiar with their products and likely to paid for their services for their businesses. Their products wouldn't be anywhere near as attractive to business if most of the people in the world didn't also use their services.

There is also the fact that if google or the government did take them down for any reason, several thousands of businesses would be crippled means there is allot of pressure to not do this.

Personally, I like the owncloud solution, too.

It is a nice solution, but can also suffer from the same issues as googles storage, the cloud providers are just as likely to be taken down as google are (though I bet this would be very unlikely in both cases).

My point ins't against online storage in the cloud, but that googles storage (or the other major providers out there) aren't all that bad either.

I have yet to see any conclusive evidence that google is selling all their users data to make a few bucks when then have enough infrastructure to make money by other means. (Though if anyone does have any evidence beyond hearsay and speculation I would love to read it)

[dibl]

Hard drives go soft, houses burn down, too risky. I'd much rather put my data someplace where I know every object is stored redundantly, continually checked for degradation or bit-rot, and even automatically versioned.

Yes, I'm facing that too. I have about 750GB of "stuff", in total. But when I think about it, only a fraction of it is "originally created by me" stuff, and then of all of that, only a fraction is "unique and valuable work product not practical to recreate in this lifetime". At the moment I've got about 500 MB of this last category backed up on U1. The rest is all backed up of course, but the backups are in my house, so .....

I saw 1TB WD hard drives on sale at Newegg this weekend for $119. I'm thinking maybe I'll just get one, dump all 750GB on it, and take it to someone else's house. Then I'll only lay awake worrying about global annihilation.

[SteveRiley]

I saw 1TB WD hard drives on sale at Newegg this weekend for $119. I'm thinking maybe I'll just get one, dump all 750GB on it, and take it to someone else's house. Then I'll only lay awake worrying about global annihilation.

CrashPlan's free version is designed specifically for this purpose -- backing up over the Internet between friends. It doesn't use any of CrashPlan's infrastructure. If you like the idea of storing a hard drive at a friend's house, the CrashPlan software will automate the backup process. And they have a Linux client, too!

[dibl]

Interesting -- I had not heard of CrashPlan. But even with good tools, I'm not sure streaming 750GB of data over anyone's ISP connection is a winning plan, do you think? My Time Warner broadband connection lets my 400MB web site upload in about 75 minutes -- I think 750GB might take about 3 months to go through!

[SteveRiley]

Seed the drive with your initial backup at home. Then take it to your friend and configure CrashPlan on your computers and his.

(I don't know if the software can work that way, but I'd think it's worth a bit of time investigating.)

[dibl]

Yep, that's what I was thinking might be workable -- just let the delta backup go over the 'net. Thanks Steve!