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Google GDrive: Supposedly Where the Rubber Meets the Road

GDrive rumored to unveil sometime this year
By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
January 28, 2009 10:00 AM EST
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 16,461

The chattering classes - both the blogosphere and the established press - are atwitter over the rumor - this particular one revived a few days ago by TG Daily - that Google is finally going to unveil its unconfirmed S3-like online storage scheme, otherwise known as GDrive and more lately as Web Drive - well, if not soon then sometime this year - and blow Windows PCs out of the water by reducing them to devices that simply access the cloud.

Google of course is expected to reinforce the move with its own updated Office-replacing Google Apps and other Web Services, giving GDrive a cachet (and an interface) that EMC's Mozy, Microsoft's SkyDrive and Amazon's S3 online storage lack.

Resistance is only expected from those Luddites unwilling to trade one master for another and let Google search the contents of what were their hard drives so it can insert ads or who would suffer separation anxiety if the cloud went down and they couldn't get to their files

Peter Brown of the Free Software Foundation, for one, frets, "It's a little bit like saying, ‘We're in a dictatorship, the trains are running on time.' Does it matter to you that someone can see everything on your computer? Does it matter that Google can be subpoenaed at any time to hand over all your data to the American government?"

The shift in paradigm is supposed to open computing to the next billion people because PCs (or better yet netbooks) would be simpler and cheaper, built, perhaps, around a species of Google's own Linux-based Android operating system and Chrome browser. And it wouldn't be personal since your files would be accessible from any Internet access device. Naturally online and local file would sync.

Back in November when the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on GDrive it said it would be free for a small amount of storage, but the paper couldn't come up with the graduated pricing for larger pieces of real estate.

Microsoft's SkyDrive offers users 25GB of free storage but files can't be bigger than 50GB. Its paid Live Mesh service offers 5 synchable gigabytes.

The Journal also said that Google could "shift tack or shelve plans for the storage offering" if it couldn't successfully deal with the issues of "data privacy, copyright [think sharing], the economics of adding storage capacity and the technical challenges of offering service without interruption."

Google's also reportedly trying to make the widgetry directly accessible from Windows, feel like a local hard drive and apparently make search transparent across Gmail, Docs and Picasa Web Albums storage.

Published January 28, 2009 – Reads 16,461
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

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Most Recent Comments
HowardTO 01/29/09 08:24:00 AM EST

Full disclosure here too. I work for dataSentinel that recently launched a new consumer oriented offering http://www.roomyak.com. We are also bothered by the “Big Brother” vibes – can you be sure your files will never data get used by governments or marketers? RoomYak solves this problem.

RoomYak is a new 3D browser platform for securing and sharing unstructured data in information rich interconnected rooms. RoomYak is built upon the dataSentinel™ storage solution, a enterprise services platform that protects sensitive, unstructured data files from big brother scanning, disastrous theft, loss or leak.

The dataSentinel technology electronically shreds a file on upload and then disperses block fragments randomly across hundreds or thousands of Infinidrive™ server locations. The complete file can only be reconstituted in real time by the unique token or key-holder using a patented dataSentinel 256-AES encryption algorithm over IP. As a user, you see your personal dataSentinel file directory in a file directory or in the RoomYak 3D display environment. To anyone else, your physical file does not exist on any server.

We would appreciate your review.
ftack 01/28/09 03:18:00 AM EST

Full disclosure here: I work for www.nomadesk.com, which offers easy and secure file sharing, wherever you are. I read your post on Google's GDrive with great interest and just wanted to add NomaDesk to the mix.
In fact, NomaDesk has similar features and is geared towards the need of the "digital nomad". We are convinced that the more data gets synchronized, the more likely it gets compromised. Therefore, NomaDesk includes an encrypted virtual drive that keeps your files securely available off-line and remote file shredding and IP-tracking with TheftGuard. Of course, we impose no limits on storage and bandwidth. The current NomaDesk release 2.6 displays file states and indicate whether files are already in use by someone else. You are also able to add and review notes (i.e. meta-data). The Mac version is on its way.

I would appreciate your review.