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Comment by neworbit | Hacker News Reader

Dear Google, you're doing it wrong. We understand that you would like google lockin on our file system, but the rest of us who do not necessarily have 24-7 100% reliable connectivity or prefer to work on things quietly offline (for instance, competing search technology) might think files resident somewhere else might not be so bad.

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Google is adding back the offline support for Docs this summer (they had it before with Gears, but removed it). So your point is inaccurate soon enough.

FUD about what Google might do in the future does not help me today nor really invalidate the point

No, but announcing the feature and showing a demo of it in action is not quite "FUD about what Google might do." It's also in line with the trend of their other products adding offline support.

How would the GDrive help you with that?

If the GDrive were similar to Dropbox, a copy of all files would be stored locally and be accessible without an Internet connection.

Google Docs offline access isn't even going to relaunch till later this year, so right now, storing files exclusively in Docs is a non-starter without an always-on Internet connection.

And that's the primary reason I don't even think of using Docs for anything except on-line surveys - I often work offline, and I need local files.

If you mean "how do I use Dropbox to do exactly that", I share encrypted files with coworkers so that they are automatically replicated when connectivity is available. This addresses both the security-of-content perspective and the fact that even in the best of circumstances we will find necessity for offline access.

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