Let the Cloud wars begin!: Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive

[KE4EST]

hmm google drive not ready yet for me

Same for me....it said my google drive is not ready????? I have had a google account since 2006.

 

[Teehar]

Same for me....it said my google drive is not ready????? I have had a google account since 2006.

Yea I set it to auto notify me when its available.Seems like it was like that with googlevoice and even gmail many years ago.

Ps...

Thanks for the tip on skydrive!I had forgotten I had opened a skydrive account at some point.They were still offering the 25Gb free storage upgrade from 7Gb so I took advantage of that.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Maybe it was available for me, because I have a paid storage account. And a really old gmail account (from the early beta). Who knows.

 

[TreyWingbat]

Where's your redundancy? All of the cloud implementations have built in redundancy and based on your description, you have none. Lose a drive, lose data. Maybe you haven't communicated properly; I can only go by what you've typed here.

I have the data backed up on other hard drives (multiple times). The cloud based files are optimized for viewing on portable devices. It's great having 30 000 a/v files at your fingertips anywhere there is Internet access!

 

[Teehar]

Maybe it was available for me, because I have a paid storage account. And a really old gmail account (from the early beta). Who knows.

Possibly.Was it set up for PC or ipad?

I don't have a paid gmail account but did have gmail when it was in beta.Can still remember giving out invites couldn't seem to get them fast enough.

 

[Stargazer]

I remember Scott getting the gmail invite and giving them out during beta and I got my gmail account that way but did not use it a whole lot. I use google voice a heck of a lot of texting and for forwarding phone calls though. Gmail is my second choice for email but I have used hotmail for so long that I have stuck with it. It says that I am not ready for the google drive yet. Maybe they are doing invites again or keeping it more private than they did the gmail even.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Possibly.Was it set up for PC or ipad?

I don't have a paid gmail account but did have gmail when it was in beta.Can still remember giving out invites couldn't seem to get them fast enough.

I just went to the webpage and the download link for the app was there. There is no iOS app yet.

 

[Ilya]

Just got updates for both DropBox and SkyDrive apps. Some bug fixes for DropBox and a major version update (2.0) for SkyDrive.

The "war" is good! It results in better products for all of us!

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Just got updates for both DropBox and SkyDrive apps. Some bug fixes for DropBox and a major version update (2.0) for SkyDrive.

The "war" is good! It results in better products for all of us!

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

Agreed. If google and Microsoft Push Dropbox to improve, I am happy. . And I get some extra redundancy.

Sent from my iPad using SatelliteGuys

 

[JamesJ]

well thanks to everyone here, I just got 25 gig of skydrive on my two accounts....one thing I will comment on is the fact that Google Docs has NO privacy...I am not in on that as the documents I deal with sometimes have NDA's, Upcoming info that is not to be leaked, and also peoples personal information...Ill pass on everything google now and just look at either ios or windows for my phones and work computers...sorry Google but your Privacy Rules Suck.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

well thanks to everyone here, I just got 25 gig of skydrive on my two accounts....one thing I will comment on is the fact that Google Docs has NO privacy...I am not in on that as the documents I deal with sometimes have NDA's, Upcoming info that is not to be leaked, and also peoples personal information...Ill pass on everything google now and just look at either ios or windows for my phones and work computers...sorry Google but your Privacy Rules Suck.

Where in their privacy policy does it deal with drive? I had - gasp - forgotten about the privacy issue with "We're not evil" Google. DOH!

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Never mind. I looked it up. AND dang it, the heck with Google.

Comparing Skydrive and Google Drive's privacy policy - Neowin

Your Content in our Services

Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

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, 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. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

And here is the Dropbox policy, which while nominally better than Google's, is not stellar either.

https://www.dropbox.com/dmca#privacy

 

[JamesJ]

Your welcome Rocky I cant stand the fact that they grant themselves permission to do whatever they want with my documents, will anything ever get taken of mine By Far Probably not, but the fact that its there makes this ol boy not want to use their stuff....if I could make it a easy transition I would get rid of my gmail address....but I have had it way to long...that will be the only service I use of theres anymore!

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Your welcome Rocky I cant stand the fact that they grant themselves permission to do whatever they want with my documents, will anything ever get taken of mine By Far Probably not, but the fact that its there makes this ol boy not want to use their stuff....if I could make it a easy transition I would get rid of my gmail address....but I have had it way to long...that will be the only service I use of theres anymore!

I have been trying to figure out how to abandon gmail, but have the same problem. 7GB of email, over 7 years. I have archived a LOT - gigabytes worth out of it using a mac mail archive program, but that is not ideal, and does not make it easy to find old stuff. And the nightmare of changing emails from a million sites I have relationships with... oy vey. I no longer use their calendar, I never was a fan of gdocs, i do use Maps - its probably one of the best programs out there. I just removed google drive from memory.

And I am thinking I am going to implement a secure encrypted folder in Dropbox for those things I actually want to keep private. Anyone have recommendations for that -- for Mac OSX 10.7.x ?

 

[mike123abc]

I use jungledisk.com for backup, and cloud drive. I like it for business since it is all encrypted. There is a monthly $3 charge but it is not per machine. It uses Amazon's S3 cloud (or rackspace if you want that).

Your data is truly your data.
Jungle Disk is like a bridge between you and your stored data. With Jungle Disk, the application is de-coupled from the storage and you "own" your own data. You can choose a custom AES-256 encryption key so that all of your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, and stays encrypted while stored. To give you even more control, we’ve even released the open source code that can be used to browse and download your data without even using Jungle Disk

Jungle Disk supports Mac, Windows, and Linux, and has from day one.
The Jungle Disk software is cross-platform, which is important even if you only use one operating system today. And, instead of treating Mac and Linux like second-class operating systems, like many services do, you’ll find the same feature sets supported across all three versions. We release upgrades for all systems simultaneously. We've even done additional work to ensure that platform-specific features, such as resource forks and finder data, work like you'd expect.

 

[lparsons21]

I've been fiddling around with the new Skydrive a bit. I also was using Windows Mesh drive which seems to still be working as of today. I suppose that will disappear at some point.

I had used Skydrive to have documents online so that I could edit or view them from any device I had. ie; pc, mac or ios device. Worked quite well for that. This new iteration still does that well. For off-site backups I really liked Mesh Drive since I could pick which file and folders I wanted backed up. Skydrive seems to want to sync only that one folder called skydrive. And that's fine for all but one file I want backed up. For that file, I have to manually copy a backup into that drive (folder), which defeats the purpose. The way I had Mesh Drive pointing to that file, it got synced any time it changed automatically. Haven't figured out a way to do that yet.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

I was on ReaddleDocs on my iPad - and it has long supported google docs. And as a result it now supports Drive. I logged in, created a folder, and then went to the web interface for drive, and sure enough the changes were there.

So, apparently if a program supports Google Docs, it in effect, supports Google Drive. I should try it with Docs to Go Premium

 

[JamesJ]

well crap:
Is Google Drive worse for privacy than iCloud, Skydrive, and Dropbox? | The Verge

 

[rockymtnhigh]

More of the same:

Google clones Dropbox: lock, stock, and privacy gaffe | ZDNet

 

[meStevo]

In the end, if you have anything sensitive, you shouldn't be putting it on anyone else's computers, which is what you're doing using cloud storage, google docs, etc.

Other than that, your tolerance for the overly vague and cya-ness of the various privacy policies has a direct link to your level of paranoia IMO.

I use Google Docs for a couple of things but not really religiously. Have 40gb of photos on my computer at home now that I've gad a nice (Canon 7d) camera for a couple years that I need to find some way of backing up so I expect my cloud usage at some point will increase once I finally address that. With 25gb at Skydrive, a bunch of space on Flickr I'm sure much of that will end up off my own hardware at some point.