Thinking About Gdrive

First of all, Gdrive is a great name for a virtual drive service. For that reason alone, Google has to do this service.

Second, online storage needs to go mainstream and it needs to happen soon.

If for no other reason than people are starting to have lots of really valuable stuff on their computers and when they lose it there is going to be some serious pain felt.  I've blogged about this before.

But backup is really just a subset of the online storage value proposition.  It's about "my computer's off but my data's on".  I stole that line from someone, but I can't remember who.  So identify yourslef please so I can give credit where credit is due.

So Google's entry into this market will be a good thing.  AOL has Xdrive but for some reason its not a mainstream service.  Same with all the online backup solutions.

We need someone to galvanize this market.  Maybe its Google.  Or maybe its someone new with an approach to this problem that is different and super compelling, like what Skype did with voip.

All I know is the time has come for online storage.

Comments

[web20guy]

Fred, you missed two very important points:

1. Who owns the data? Are the users willing to see ads besides their data, when they open it from GDrive? If yes, what percentage? If No, where is the model?

2. Authentication. UserName and Password will not suffice, and there is no other mechanism available online. Will Henry Blodget store his analysis information online if he knows the "key" is jsut a password?

[James Sears]

I completely agree, but really data itself is just a subset of the value of such a service. Think about applications and operating systems (at least configurations) being stored remotely. Then you have a virtual portable desktop with all of your apps, data, and settings that runs anywhere you have sufficient connectivity. Take that beyond the PC to mobile devices etc and things really start getting interesting.

James N. Sears
http://www.jamesnsears.com/

[John Zeratsky]

I have a bunch of hard drives at home that I use for backup. Every night every single thing on all of my computers gets backed up there.

I want to use GDrive (or any similar service) in the same way -- keep a full nightly backup of *all* my stuff so I always have it.

So yeah, the time has come. Well put :-)

[Dylan Salisbury]

A problem is that storage "feels" like it should be free these days. Yahoo Mail and Gmail give you so much storage for free, and hard disks are so cheap, that I can't imagine paying $10/month for a service like Xdrive without feeling like a sucker, even if I understand the value proposition.

[Ric]

Fred - you might like to get in touch with Omnidrive here in Australia
( http://www.omnidrive.com ) - it's still in private beta, but you could probably get involved - there's an email address on the beta page.

Nik also blogs at http://www.nik.com.au/ and there are screenshots on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/perfected/sets/1611775/

[Corey Podolsky]

Interesting stuff indeed. Remote storage is a critical component for the future of media as people should be able to consume and store content any way they wish and store it forever if they wish to. But but for content to truly flourish, Device and Access, as well as Storage, must also improve.

Here is the future that I am waiting for:

Device:
- low cost
- flexible, expandable screen & console
- multi function (with an adjustable screen for each funtion)
- durable, yet low replacement cost
- secure
- opportunities for accessories
- built in terabytes of memory and storage

Access & Storage
- Free ubiquitous broadband (as a Public utility)
- Dynamic real-time remote storage back-up (although the device may have terabytes of storage, the remote back-up will ensure that every piece of personal content can be accessed remotely from any device securely)

Content:
- All media can be sampled before purchased
- All media can be had for free with advertisements
- or for a fee, without advertisements

In other words, create the device that can be a phone, pda, portable music, video and game player, full-screen web browser and desktop application device, give it terabytes of storage with dynamic, real-time remote storage backup, as well as ubiquitous broadband to ensure constant access, and finally, offer consumers a choice of how they want to consume their content.

The Gdrive is a critical component of this future, as will be broadband ubiquity and superior devices. When storage, access and the device all come together, content will truly flourish.

[Michael Gurau]

There's an angel-backed startup in MA doing this as well...www.carbonite.com

[alan]

i think success in this space will require vertical integration - owning as much of the pipe as from PC to server as you can, to avoid the tariffs you'll have to pay to shunt all those bits back and forth. google's in a great position to do that, having been buying up dark fibre and building out distributed data centres worldwide for a few years now. really only google and yahoo! have the datacentre footprint to pull this off, though they could acquire a startup like omnidrive to provide a nift front-end...

[Emily]

Interesting article, there is an online backup service I have been using for the past 4-5 years. Its called IBackup and they have been reliable. I have many pictures that I would hate to lose, and documents, tax stuff, etc. I think I will stick to this service for now.

http://www.ibackup.com

[David Friend]

The issue of password protection is one that we are mulling over with regard to Carbonite's backup service. One of our users wrote to us about another online backup service that he had been using where he elected to "keep his key," which he printed out for safe keeping. Two years later, his hard drive crashed and his key didn't work. The backup company insisted that he had copied it down wrong. They could do nothing to recover his files since he had the only key. He was furious. We polled some of our other users on this subject, and with the exception of a few techies, nobody understood the issue. When we explained about passwords vs key, the response was "Well how do I know you don't have a copy of my key?" Or "How come a password works for my bank, but I can't do backup safely with just a password?" It's just beyond the average consumer.

[David Friend]

In the spirit of stealing lines, someone recently wrote "Backup is like flossing. Everyone knows they should do it, but a lot of people don't bother." (I don't remember who, either).

But backup is a deferable nuisance. I believe if online backup can be made simple enough and cheap enough, at some point everyone will do it. Free, of course, would be great.

But as online services go, backup is pretty resource intensive. The depreciated cost of large scale generic servers runs over $.50 per gigabyte per year when you include ancillary equipment, and the electric bill adds over 20 cents per gigabyte per year to that, plus an equal amount for cooling. Our average customer right now has about 11GB in their backup. So there is a real out of pocket cost of over $10 for someone to store my online backup, not counting the cost of bandwidth, which can add another 30% or so. This is many times the cost of providing services like news, maps, and even email (where most people don't use more than a few hundred MBs of storage, despite the freebees).

While Google can afford to give anything away right now, that doesn't mean Gdrive will be a money-maker for them, if in fact it turns out to be unlimited free space. Eventually they are going to have to get paid somehow for this service, either by charging, reading through your backups to gleen marketing information, or pushing advertising at you. Online backup, at least at Carbonite , is as invisible, automatic, unobtrusive, and inexpensive as we can make it. But it's not free. And neither are outboard hard drives, CD-ROMs, or your time. BTW, Online PC Backup comes out of beta on May 2.

[Sam]

I have been an enthusiastic DriveHQ user for almost 2 years. Their service is great!

All GDrive features are long available and better on DriveHQ.com. Visit www.drivehq.com and watch the demo.

# Backup. DriveHQ Online Backup works great. It has a lot of high-end features, much better than GDrive, including versioning, scheduled backup, encrypted storage, compressed upload, incremental backup and resuming, etc.

# Sync. DriveHQ FileManager can sync multiple PCs, multiple user accounts.

# VPN-less access. You can access your data from anywhere using a web browser, any FTP client, or DriveHQ Cline software, or SMTP/POP3 email with Outlook!

# Collaborate. DriveHQ Group Account service is a true enterprise class collaboration platform. You can easily share folders to different people with different access rights. DriveHQ Group Account owner / admin can create/manage/delete sub-accounts.

# Disconnected access. On the plane? VPN broken? All your files are still accessible as DriveHQ FileManager can cache the data for offline access! DriveHQ even offers SMTP/POP3 emails for offline Outlook access with unlimited email storage!

DriveHQ offers basic service for free. So why the hype and why the wait? Sign up at: http://www.drivehq.com/?refID=2925384