I'm still hoping they'll someday announce Drive (the local file sync part) as the universal Google Data Liberation mechanism.
For instance, it would be awesome if with this change you could click a button that says "also sync my gmail with drive" and you'd get a local backup of your email in your drive folder. Many people wouldn't want to waste the GB of local space for the backup, and I don't know what format they should actually use, but having the option would be amazing.
Eventually it should be that all your google data should go through Drive and by syncable. Imagine the ease on people's mind -- no matter if all the Google datacenters were struck by lightning or your account alone was disabled for some reason, good or bad -- if you already had your data saved locally with no more than clicking a checkbox.
It's already pretty trivial to set up a standard IMAP client and sync all your mail to your desktop. Some clients even support GMail's labels so you don't have to deal with that. (Each "label" shows up as a different IMAP folder, so normally you end up with a copy of each email for each label you give it.)
Yes, I should clarify that I think it's great that IMAP support exists, that you can certainly backup your email relatively easily today, and that the Data Liberation/Takeout thing is great in general. I'm using email sync as the example here, but the benefits would really come from a universal (or more universal than today) sync, not just an easy email sync.
I just think Drive would be a great way to unify backup methods across the Data Liberation options. Gmail backup is already relatively easy, but some of the others are less so, and being able to turn them all on with a few clicks (rather than remembering to visit the web interface and exporting every few weeks) would seem to be a better solution. Ideally IMAP support would continue, and, even more ideally, the hypothetical Drive backup format for a gmail account would be some typical email client save format for IMAP accounts so you could (at least somewhat) transparently open the backup in a major email client.
All of this is certainly not trivial, and less so now that I thought through the above. If you treat the local "backup" as a first-class version of your mail by actually opening it in a client and then altering emails in there, drive could then in theory sync it back with the gmail account just with IMAP.
Some account data you'd probably have to specify is a read-only backup and not as read/write. For instance, exporting your Reader data gives you a whole json format export, as does exporting your g+ data, and I'm sure other products as well. I'd imagine it wouldn't be worth the extra engineering effort (and possibly a recipe for disaster) to support random changes to that json being synced back up to the cloud (if it was even data you had permissions to change in the first place...for instance, if you edited the text of a post you commented on, but it wasn't your post).
You could probably get around those by just explicitly labeling the subfolders as "Google+ backup" or something, so there's no expectation of changes there being synced back to your account. Should it overwrite any changes you made locally next time it syncs, though?
Luckily I don't have to figure those things out. Still a good idea though :)
What, just setting up an email client? Most mainstream apps now have presets for major services so you don't have to pick port numbers or figure out what authentication methods to use. Just type your address and it looks up the server settings for you, one click and you're done.
Currently have over 90,000 emails (~9 GB worth) archived in my GMail account. Any idea how long it would take to transfer it all to my desktop via IMAP?
Unscientifically I've seen between 1-3 messages per second via imapsync so ~a day. The bottleneck seems to be the IMAP protocol or rate limiting on google's side, I've certainly never seen it approach wire speed.
Google has published total "bandwidth limits" where they say[1] "To address migration needs, you can download your entire mailbox approximately 3 times per month."
I believe it also applies for anyone grandfathered into the free Google Apps standard. I'd like to know the limits on free accounts if that is not true.
Furthermore, you have to jump through several difficult-to-recognize hoops to get that 9GB on your disk. IMAP will only sync what the sever feels are recent emails, and envelope information for the rest.
Depends on your email client. Thunderbird downloaded full copies of two of my Gmail accounts when I added them and selected the "Keep messages for this account on this computer" option.
OfflineIMAP crashes a lot. I have been using it for many years and with each upgrade, I'm optimistic that stability and/or performance will improve, but it still sucks a huge amount of CPU and hangs several times per day.
See also: https://github.com/rgrove/larch - "Larch is a tool to copy messages from one IMAP server to another quickly and safely. It’s smart enough not to copy messages that already exist on the destination and robust enough to deal with interruptions caused by flaky connections or misbehaving servers."
We are talking about migration plan here - eg: moving from gmail to hotmail without losing your data, or better transferring them to your new provider.
In any case, your data may be physically safe in Google datacenter but you are still one Google policy breach away from losing your access to it.
Or if you had a network outage and wanted to access your files.
I use Mail.app to sync my gmail locally, but it'd be nice if Drive actually synced my Google Docs locally. Currently Drive just places a small json shim file on the disk, rather than syncing a usable document.
Data Liberation does export your docs in a usable format, but it's a rather awkward, manual process.
If you want your actual Google Docs files synced locally, I recommend SocialFolders. It runs in the system tray as an unobtrusive service. It also syncs Twitter images and some other services. The free version has worked for me as I don't have many thousands of files in Docs.
Or how 'bout this: you click "also sync my photos with drive" and then you enable the same option in Flickr and iCloud, and now you can use any of the three photo services to organize your albums, and people can use any of the three services to view them, and it's always the same fully-synchronized data for everyone.
I also want to be able to drag my iPhoto Library folder into Google Drive and have it get magically parsed and turned into G+ photo albums -- even if this is just a one-way process.
Yeah, exactly, I don't understand why they don't make "Photos" a folder in Google Drive and vice-versa. Subfolders can be albums, so when you upload something from your phone to G+ it also shows up on Google Drive, and when you drag a photo in your Photos folder it gets uploaded to your G+ account.
I don't really care that much, though, since there's no Drive client for linux (how hard can it be to port the thing?).
It's actually pretty well done, I used to use it til I moved to ownCloud. Interestingly it's more stable than the official client on my Mac, on Ubuntu 12.04
It's nice that there's a third party option (yay for open APIs) but it's pretty weird that Google still hasn't bothered to make a Linux Drive client themselves. This is basically the only reason I'm still using Dropbox primarily, though I'll probably start moving some files to Drive when the bonus space I got from their college competition thing expires.
Use CloudPull ($10) from http://goldenhillsoftware.com and it's by far the best Google backup tool I've found. It supports Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Drive/Docs, and Google Reader. The app backs up a max of 10 accounts in the background and all the data is available in standard file formats.
If you want true sync then use insync ($10/account) from https://www.insynchq.com. It gives you two-way sync of your Google Drive. You can edit your document in Office offline and it syncs to your Drive. It works very well.
The prices they put of up for extra storage are exactly half of what Dropbox asks. Also, the 15GB free plan compares well to the 2GB Dropbox plan as you don't have to jump through any referral hoops (or quests), instead you get it right away.
In the long run this is a commodity and Dropbox won't be able to compete. In the short term, this is a blog post about Google upgrading a terrible "buy extra storage" page and convoluted offering that consumers up until now couldn't bother to digest.
It is an epic race between commodity and incompetence/bureaucracy it seems. Two of the most powerful forces mankind has ever produced. :)
Amazon Cloud Drive also happens to cost less than Google drive. $59.88 per year for 100 GB on Google Drive vs $50 for Amazon Cloud Drive. Cloud drive also has a sync app.
Google also has a history of raising prices and/or getting rid of freebies for paid services, once the product is considered stable (read popular), with the Maps API, Google App Engine and Google Apps serving as examples.
It's good to have diversity in the market, and you should use whatever service you want (I don't really see anything in the article to suggest that merging storage quotas is a benefit over dropbox, anyway, it's just a simplification of split storage limits that I know has confused at least some people), but you're reaching with those examples.
Both the Maps API quota and the AppEngine price changes were not consumer product changes, and the free Google Apps account change wasn't taking anything away from anyone, it's just no longer offering a free tier for future consumers. The only people with room to complain on that one were the people on HN that day talking about having clients in the pipeline that they'd now have to add an extra charge for because there was no warning, but if you already have a free account, there's nothing to "fall for" but making an assumption that you would be able to sign up for more free accounts.
I am not railing against diversity in the market. I like diversity and I am glad they released Google Drive. My response was to the parent questioning slightly more expensive alternatives, not to the piece of news itself.
As to your reply, as I was already mentioning, Google Storage itself was cheaper prior to Drive and I was using it for Picasa. I'm still on the old plan, paying a yearly $20 for 80 GB of storage (because I may use it for Docs and because I was too lazy to pull some photos out of Picasa).
You can always come up with a rationale like the Maps API and App Engine not being "consumer products", however Google is the only company I have a relationship with that increases prices instead of decreasing them and that takes away freebies. Amazon's AWS services are also not consumer products and they get cheaper over time. Amazon's freebies have a clear expiration date (like the 1-year free tier, which you know lasts for only 1 year, because it's in the freaking title).
Speaking of App Engine, they not only changed their prices, they changed their pricing scheme, breaking the original promise of the service. I could rail endlessly about how App Engine sucks, but that's for another discussion.
Speaking of Google Apps - you view it as a special offer. I view it as a broken promise, because they never mentioned that they are going to pull this option after releasing it.
First of all, I ended up saying to several small business owners "create an account on Google Apps, it's both free and awesome". Now their stuff is tied to Google Apps. For now their accounts are free, but you never know. They are also subject to Google's TOS, so they could get locked out of their accounts by a script that calculated a probability for TOS violations. I'm also bothered by the lock-in Google does with their @gmail.com email addresses they require for Google Accounts. Google Apps was a way out, even for normal users. Not anymore.
I beg to differ. My Dropbox subscription costs as much as 2 Starbucks coffees and gives me unlimited version and deletion history, plus Dropbox respects me enough to provide me with a Linux client.
Yes, I could move easily, but by supporting the company with monopolistic behavior, I may not have any options left.
Having to use an unsupported third party tool doesn't speak well to the product. That's just begging for headaches a few months down the road when Google changes on the backend and InSync deletes or duplicates everything. Not InSync's fault, they just have no means of making sure Google doesn't break their tool.
Yeah, that is true. But I use Insyc on Windows because it is much more stable than the default drive app and supports symbolic links. So it isn't so much that Linux support is bad as it is that Drive support is bad.
Which makes me unsure we will ever see one released externally, it must be the support cost that holds them back. Internally, they only have to support one distribution (their own) and some very smart users.
AFAICT Google internal Linux is pretty much a customized Ubuntu. If a Linux desktop client has a target market, users of Ubuntu + other Debian flavors represent most of it.
Not to mention your files are not stored exclusively online as with Google's Drive. Unless, of course, you're willing to jump through a few hoops in Google's case.
Furthermore, I get the impression there's an increasing fear of becoming a false positive on Google, therefore losing all of your data somewhere in the cracks of the Goog, with basically zero recourse.
You're suggesting that Google is going to charge for gmail and/or G+? That seems highly unlikely to me. Also for "Apps for Your Domain" they already do charge if you want more than one account.
My Google Apps account has 10 free accounts, because that's what they gave you for free initially.
People also don't remember that Google Storage was like 10 times cheaper prior to Drive, which is why I was initially backing up my photos in Picassa. Well, not anymore.
Dropbox fills that niche of people that don't want robots trawling through their files so they can figure out what viagra or underwater mortgage refinancing ads to display, though. :) Anyway, I think you are wrong. There are plenty of people not comfortable with storing their data on Google for a myriad of reasons so I don't think this has effectively shut down the online storage market.
Privacy concerns outside our echo chamber are not such a big deal as you imply. To wit, the hundreds of millions of Gmail and Facebook users - I should think the amount of people who are aware of this issue AND care enough to vote with their wallet is negligible. (Not to mention that Dropbox or cloud anything is hardly better, it came out recently that Dropbox employees can look at your files just like Facebook employees can glance at your profile)
I think that even ignoring privacy concerns, theres a quality difference between Dropbox and Google that Google is currently losing.
Our team is only 10 employees, distributed across two offices, but the number of times that I have seen email attachments for docs that were supposed to be synced in Drive multiple hours ago isn't trivial and has led to most of the team returning to Dropbox despite the space limitations. As is, if a doc isn't created in the Google environment (Google Docs, Calendar, etc.) then it will reside in Dropbox.
You say that but yet Microsoft has created a whole marketing campaign around this. It's a humorous to think no one really cares about privacy. I think that is more the kind of attitude in our echo chamber than the other (that no one really cares about privacy).
There will always be alternatives which you pay hard cash for, but if you want 'free' services you most likely end up paying through advertising.
The majority of people seem to find their internet habits being sold as a data point to advertisers and getting targeted ads is an ok 'price to pay' for gmail/outlook/google drive/skydrive/dropbox etc et al.
Again if you don't like this deal there is always someone willing to take your money in exchange for such priviledge.
Firstly, Drive is still catching up with Dropbox's software. I tried to move from Dropbox to using Drive and I couldn't. Drive just isn't reliable enough. I've had problems with several files that wouldn't sync until I updated/restarted the Drive client. They'll fix these issues, but I still don't trust it as much.
Secondly, Dropbox offers services Drive doesn't, such as it's API for iOS and Android apps. I use the iOS App with several other apps and it's not clear either if Google will ever offer an API like that, or if they do whether independent developers will adopt it the same way they have with Dropbox.
I think Dropbox have established a pretty secure niche for now. If I were them I'd definitely be concerned about Drive, and it's possible they'll get squeezed out if they don't continue to innovate (I hate typing that word, it's so over-used), but Dropbox must have always known that if they stood still they'd be roadkill eventually.
People seem to forget about the network effect when discussing DropBox.
The main reason I continue to use DropBox over cheaper alternatives, is that most of my collaborators in other companies have DropBox, and we use shared folders to exchange files. DropBox was the first solution simple enough to make them switch from using mail attachments.
With Dropbox I'm not really paying for the storage. I'm paying for the really smooth and fast syncing experience.
The price per gigabyte is quite heavy, but with my Dropbox usage the most costs for Dropbox are probably not coming from the actual storage but from the network traffic and computing resources needed to make the sync work.
This sounds nice but I'm afraid I can't trust Google with my storage needs due the constant nagging feeling that all my stuff could be gone tomorrow and I would have no recourse.
The stories of accounts being turned off for unknown (to the users) reasons are pretty scary to me. The last one was due to the contents of a file in the user's Google Docs account.
At this point, Amazon and even SkyDrive sound like safer bets, as odd as that sounds. Maybe with a little more access to customer support I'd be less queasy.
To add to your fears I had catastrophic syncing issues last few. Stupidly enough I had turned off local backups thinking Google would be better. 10gb of design files gone.
I still haven't worked out what happened but there where 5 computers syncing the files at work, something got muddled and deleted everything off all the computers at once. All I know for sure is somehow they where modified by a person who wasn't at work that day (and hence not on there PC). They where then deleted, but not available in the online trash, gone off all computers but not moved to the local trash as the forums so it should of, and all history had disappeared from the online drive.
They still appeared how ever if I did a search for them, you just couldn't navigate to them or find them in through any other part of the UI. So I did manage to zip them all up and get my data back.
Anyway lesson learned, and for me its dropbox and local backups from now on. All trust lost for me. I have no idea if it was syncing, an error in the cloud, or someone in the office, but yeah total loss of trust for me.
Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive are more of folder mirroring, much like RAID is data mirroring. Any good sysadmin will remind you that RAID provides protection against hardware failures, but in no way is data backup or protection. Onsite and Offsite backups are always important.
In my opinion, you shouldn't trust any single provider. Google is a good option for one of the copies (encrypted, of course, if you want any kind of privacy).
We (rsync.net) offered HN readers[1] 10c/GB, per month pricing, for life earlier this month ...
I have no idea if you're interested in SSH-enabled storage, or if you use CLI tools at all, but if you do, email us. We are the safe bet you're looking for. We've also been doing it much longer than the others you mentioned.
I suspect the reason there are more stories HN about Google accounts being closed for bad reasons is that there are more users on HN that depends on Google accounts.
Note that all such reports should be viewed with some suspicion, we typically only get one side of the story, and often some important detail is left out.
Here is an amusing reddit thread where ArenaNet publicly answers people who claimed they were banned for inappropriate names:
So how about an update to the OSX client so that it doesn't eat resources or choke on shared folders?
Or generally put some development behind Drive in general, not just the client but also the apps that have been rebranded as part of Drive? It's hard enough to trust Google not to discontinue stuff as it is, being almost completely stagnant isn't helping.
This isn't development, this just moving the deck chairs a bit.
Bullshit, whatever happened to the Gmail Infinity+1 promise? Remember that counter that promised ever increasing gmail storage? This move seems to contradict that goal.
> Google Apps users will also be getting shared storage, so visit the enterprise blog to learn more.
This is a big deal. Previously, even though you could upgrade the regular version of Gmail, you couldn't upgrade your Google Apps Gmail storage for any price, even if you were a paying customer. A few of our accounts are getting pretty close to the 25 GB limit for Google Apps Pro customers.
Yeah this is double-edged news for Pro customers. On one hand you can give people lots of storage. On the other hand they'll use it and it'll then be that much harder to ever move off big G.
While it does give an incentive to stay, I'm not sure it makes it harder to leave. For Gmail and Docs at least, the export format (mbox through IMAP and Office docs, respectively) are the standard for anywhere you might want to go or anything you might want to roll on your own.
It's definitely doable either way but having a fixed maximum mailbox size makes a lot of things a lot easier. Individual users get moved in smaller and bounded chunks, you can spec storage utilization as a simple function of number of users and not worry about shuffling people around as mailboxes grow, things like that.
Nope, they've got to have a reason for your G+ notification to always be highlighted, and a reason to have anyone visit (if only accidentally, or begrudgingly) G+
How about this: I want a way to consolidate my paid for space. I have 1TB of Drive and much less (100GB) with Dropbox. I'd like a way to put files that I need highly available (almost universally small files) on dropbox and big files that I care less about on Drive; without two completely separate directory trees like I have now.
I've considered trying to set something up with fuse and a union filesystem, but the effort for that exceeds the value it would provide for me.
The worst customers, I call them pathological customers,
are attracted to things that don’t have a lot of money.
It’s amazing how many people have told me this. You raise
prices, and you deal with less crazy people. At 99 cents,
people have very unreasonable expectations.
Very true. I noticed this with an iPhone app I developed. It was a sports app and I manually updated things like results and tables throughout the year. The app sold well at 99¢. As it was a sports app and required regular updating (not to mention the feature updates I regularly put out) I decided to create a new app and charge for it again the following season. It had some new features but the basic functions were all still there. The number of horrible emails I received was crazy. A lot of people got angry, ignored my explanation, and told me they would use a competitors app (fine by me). But I was genuinely surprised by a few emails personally attacking me and telling me to 'fucking die'. I did this for a few years and the solution seemed to be doubling the price. Revenues didn't drop away but the pathological customers certainly did.
Yeah, I can be a cheap ass about this kind of stuff, but I do pay for some of their services already. However, I do think there is an area of need here for low income folks / students who cannot afford even $5-10/month.
What are "Google+ Photos"? Are these equivalent to when I make an album on Facebook? If so, I'm not a fan.
I use SkyDrive and have it so pictures I take with my WP are auto-uploaded. As such, my SkyDrive is filled with tonnssss of pictures (I take a good amount of photos on my phone). But the pictures that get auto-uploaded to SkyDrive are a different "type" (at the very least, simply unfiltered) than those which I would upload to a Facebook album/G+ Photos.
I would be annoyed as a Google service user if I had to choose between allocating room for "photos uploaded to drive" and "Google+ photos". They serve different purposes, and a heavy user of both services will have many photos on both.
It just means that photo above some resolution uploaded through G+ (or instant upload) count towards your google storage quota (shared with drive and gmail). I am not sure what you mean by allocating room.
Oh wait so in Google land, if I have an Android phone and have instant upload enabled, photos go into Google+ rather than Google Drive? I think that alleviates my concern.
> Oh wait so in Google land, if I have an Android phone and have instant upload enabled, photos go into Google+ rather than Google Drive? I think that alleviates my concern.
Doesn't have to be an Android phone either; G+ app on iOS does it, too.
Google Drive does seem especially flaky in the way it complains about "unsyncable" files and doesn't bother to even give me an error code to investigate.
They aren't "unsyncable" per se, but Google Drive has preferences. For example, I could not sync files from a stackable encrypted filesystem (EncFS or eCryptfs). Files that go just fine through Dropbox or SugarSync. Same "error". I guess there's no money for Google in files you can't take a peek at.
How about a paid feature to attach your own storage to Drive? Say $5/month, you specify ftp credentials (or sftp), and Drive automatically uses it as additional storage. Ideally you could choose folders that should always or never be stored on the external storage, and for anything else it would automatically push less-used stuff, like a swap.
Seems like a win-win. Sure Google sells a bit less storage to advanced users, but many of those users would currently use something like OwnCloud anyway. This would be easier to set up though, lets you have effectively unlimited storage in one directory tree, and opens up syncing to anything that syncs with Drive. On Google's side, after the initial development investment, they get an additional income stream essentially for free.
For $5/month though, I'd ideally want it to include a subscription to a dyndns-like service, so you could more easily host the additional storage on a home server.
Not very exciting news. I would've thought they'd at least increase the storage to 20 GB by now. After all it's been a year since they gave the 10 and 5 GB to those 2 services, and storage prices have dropped, while storage needs have increased. Why aren't they keeping up with it?
I'm sitting on a free 25 GB from Microsoft's initial skydrive offering. Google probably won't increase it until there is some sort of challenger out there. As it stands, they are offering more space than all their competitors, so its doubtful an extra 5GB would do much to attract new users, or even differentiate them much.
Not so sure storage costs have dropped so much. Hard drives aren't getting bigger (4TB is two years old now) and electricity and other data center costs have risen.
This is great. Only downside is the limits and prices for the paid plans haven't changed. So before you could pay $5/month for 100GB of drive + 5GB free gmail; now $5/month gets you 100GB combined for both. Still, can't quibble too much over 5%.
They're rolling out great features, but it's still not possible to save all revisions of a file onto your disk in Drive. You have to download them one by one.
If you share a folder publicly or with an individual, they cannot download it all in its entirety either. The files have to be downloaded one-by-one. Makes it very toy-like for business usage & sharing large collections of documents/files.
You can add shared folders (as in folders other people shared with you) to your Drive through this page: https://drive.google.com/#shared-with-me (or click on Shared with me on the Drive site). Click on the folder and then on "Add to My Drive". It will even get synced to your local disk. You can also download the whole folder (right-click).
Spent a long time looking for this, they should really work on the UI for this feature.
I was referring to publicly shared folders w/ non-Google users. If you don't have a Google/Drive account and someone shares a link-accessible folder, it can be viewed and items downloaded piecemeal, but there is no option to download the entire folder.
Link-accessible Box.net folders don't have this constraint. You can share a folder link w/ someone who doesn't have an account and they can download the entire folder w/o creating one. Google only let's you view the contents and download one-at-a-time. Your work-around is good to know, but you'd have to be sharing with another Drive user for it to work.
Google is evil. Google is nothing ore than another mechanism for the US government to spy on us further enhancing the police state. They are in bed with the NSA and are directly benefiting from their incestuous relationship with the federal government. Look at their recent endeavuours. Google glasses,illegal wifi sniffing, google plus, google fiber, andriod phones, TOS changes, youtube requiring your full name, storing of google searches. They've found a way into every aspect of our lives and thoughts. Wasn't it their mission statement that stated: Google don't be evil? Ya right.
Anyone know how to prevent googlebot from spidering my comments? I don't want an IRS audit.
For instance, it would be awesome if with this change you could click a button that says "also sync my gmail with drive" and you'd get a local backup of your email in your drive folder. Many people wouldn't want to waste the GB of local space for the backup, and I don't know what format they should actually use, but having the option would be amazing.
Eventually it should be that all your google data should go through Drive and by syncable. Imagine the ease on people's mind -- no matter if all the Google datacenters were struck by lightning or your account alone was disabled for some reason, good or bad -- if you already had your data saved locally with no more than clicking a checkbox.