Google Drive leaks suggest 5GB free storage, in-app document editing | Hacker News Reader

Google Drive leaks suggest 5GB free storage, in-app document editing

engadget.com

72 pointsfint40 comments

I remember when Gmail first came out to the public with a whopping 1GB of email storage, 50-100 times what the competitors were offering[1]. It was a great, streamlined mail experience that users flocked to immediately, leaving Yahoo Mail and Hotmail in the dust.

If this leak is true, it will be one of the most underwhelming releases by Google in quite a while. 5GB? That's 2.5 times what Dropbox gives you for free (and they've been giving 2GB away for years), at parity with Amazon Cloud Drive (in 2011), and 1/5th of Microsoft's SkyDrive (25GB).

What happened to the Google that would release products that really rocked the boat?

[1] http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html

If pure higher storage numbers are the way to rock the boat, wouldn't Dropbox be one of the least impressive options and everyone would be praising Skydrive? There is clearly much more than just greater bytes equals greater storage service. Even if Gmail only offered a similar amount of storage as Yahoo/Hotmail when it launched, it still would have been a leap forward for its interface alone (though the lanuch would have lost some of its punch, obviously).

Well, did Box.net "rock the boat" by offering 50gb of storage for free? That's much more than any competitor, and frankly IMO most people would prefer Dropbox despite it's much smaller size for free users.

There are many ways to rock a boat, and just offering whopping amounts of free stuff isn't the only way. Creating something genuinely useful is much more important. Gmail's storage was genuinely useful because it mean you never had to think about deleting emails anymore.

We'll just have to see whether Google Drive will be useful or not...

I think Google has a major opportunity here by integrating this to Google+ and Circles. File sharing would become really easy.

Looks like they are matching Amazon's offering. Even though Amazon has not released an API to its cloud drive (its only a matter of time before they will).

Dropbox really should have sold to Apple when they had a chance. It will be interesting to see how iCloud and these new offerings impact their adoption rates. Looks like Box did a better differentiation by going explicitly after the enterprise integration.

Agreed. I would not have believed it if you told me three years ago, but box.com is positioning to significantly outpace dropbox in the enterprise space (i.e., the pay for service space). I work with banks and law firms. Dropbox is perceived as the devil (though I don't think it's as bad as our IT admin makes it out to be). On the other hand, many have formally adopted a branded versions of box.com. Crazy.

Box has very confusing pricing for personal use. Why limit file size? Makes no sense.

They are also 2x times as expensive as Dropbox. $20/month only gets me 50gb on box.com, whereas I get 100gb with dropbox. And no annoying file size restriction.

Dropbox teams also seem like a much better deal.

Frankly, in my experience, it's all about perceived security. That and the utility of setting permissions for third party access with read/modify logs. It's kind of like Merrill's data room, but web 2.0'y and faster/more user friendly.

Dropbox was easier (I loved being able to right click a zip file sitting in my public folder), but our clients told us it was too risky to have a document sitting on an open live link without password/user access control. We're currently using sendthisfile.com, but I believe we're moving to box.com soon. We're a top end AmLaw 200 firm.

I was quoted $480/year per user on Box.net (80 users). Dropbox may not be as good as them, but is a satisfactory solution based on their significantly lower pricing.

5GB? I expected there'd but some kind of limit but I didn't expect them to set it smaller than gmail.

If true, I suspect this is part of their apparent move to a more paid-service model. This has been happening with Google Apps, where they've increasingly obscured the free/Standard/whatever-they're-calling-it-now level, have reduced the user cap for that level most recently from 50 to 10, and are promoting the paid business level more heavily including e.g. on the sign on page for (just/plain) Gmail.

5 GB for free. Or sign up for Google Checkout, erm Wallet, erm... What's-It-Now (Play?), and get more space.

Could be wrong. But that's my off-the-cuff read, if the information is accurate.

That said, 5 GB might be plenty for the casual, Gmail-type user. Also, I'd like to know whether it is a separate allocation; since it is less than the current "free" allocation for Gmail, I'm assuming so.

P.S. One could also compare this amount to the per user quota in Google Apps free/Standard/erm level. I'm not recalling what that is, right now -- 5 GB (which would match this, WRT documents), or 15 GB. IIRC, the Apps quota includes email storage.

I would be so much happier with a free 5GB product plus paid extra capacity than a free huge capacity which generates no revenue and thus gets neglected like every other non core Google product.

Just to be clear, I meant my comment more as observation that critique (whether favorable or unfavorable).

I think this product will compete with dropbox more than gmail.

I think his point is even Gmail got over 7GB (which is plenty for mails), yet Drive gets only 5GB.

People are much more likely to use the full 5GB for file storage than they are to use the full limit of their gmail storage. The limit on gmail is high, but I think Google is banking on the fact that the average user will probably use less than half of that storage.

I'm still skeptical. These rumours have been around for so long without anything ever surfacing, it seems unlikely that anything ever will.

Here's my wishlist:

1. OS and platform agnostic

2. Easy to use

3. High storage at least on the paid version

4. Secure

5. and above all, an unequivocal guarantee from Google that they won't "peek" into my files just to show ads on gmail or search based off this info, even in the free version.

> 5. and above all, an unequivocal guarantee from Google that they won't "peek" into my files just to show ads on gmail or search based off this info, even in the free version.

Just wondering - why does it bother people to have algorithms reading your files? If you're not encrypting the files yourself, then at some point a Google computer has to "read" your file even just to save it to the database. Is there some point where the algorithm reaches a certain level of complexity (presumably the Google ad ranking algorithm is quite complex) that you feel like it's similar to a human looking at your files?

Unless you do client-side encryption (which is impractical unless you want to manually sync your encryption key between your devices), they can't ever issue such a guarantee. Even if Google promised to never examine your data, it could still be subpoenaed.

Considered rsync.net? I was pretty happy with them, but got burdened enough with slow-uplink home networks to have to drop them as my backup provider.

Rsync.net always looked cool but is way too expensive at .80c/gb. I can use duplicity and do incremental backups to S3 and encrypt with gpg all in one command for much cheaper.

https://nimbus.io/

Almost public release, and $0.06/GB.

Take a look at Ayala, it matches all your points except it isn't Google.

I wanted to write Wuala. That's what you get when you have autocorrect enabled on Android phone.

Drive needs: 1) increased storage space for a fee and 2) the ability to grab files from an FTP server somehow. I'm in for sure then.

1 is dead certain. 2 is a bizarre request, and you're probably the only person who'd want that.

Do you mean like Cyberduck or something?

http://cyberduck.ch/

Number 2 is oddly specific. Who uses FTP anymore anyway? (btw, those of you downvoting, STOP using FTP. seriously. Just stop.)

A lot of (very serious) people, I've found.

I'd seriously hope those (very serious) people use SFTP, at least.

I was always under impression that SFTP has much more in common with SCP, than with FTP. Is that wrong?

You are correct that SFTP is not FTP. To be fair to the parent, he didn't say so either. Here are the differences between FTPS, SFTP and FTP over SSH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol#Secure_F...

My original point was merely that FTP is far from dead for general purpose file transfer. It can still be quite safe if precautions are taken with encrypting the data first. Anyone looking at it will see nothing but gobbledegook, naturally.

It isn't dead and yes, of course, I know the difference between FTP and SFTP.

And my original point was that FTP is inherently insecure. It's transmitting username and password in the clear, for starters.

(To be clear, I'm talking about plain vanilla RFC-959 FTP. Yes, you can add additional security layers on top. Sadly, at least the places I've seen still use FTP are the places that still use it in vanilla config. I have no idea what your experiences are - this is a comment on the general state of FTP users.)

Just found out my father's work does all of their EDI transactions via unsecured FTP. This is like billions of dollars in orders, checks, etc that are being passed around via FTP.

Stop doing this people. There are far better formats than FTP, and yes, even better and more appropriate than SFTP.

(Further, even if Drive supported it, are y'all going to be uploading your private keys to Drive?)

Of course, and then some.

1) Yes 2) I think what you mean is the ability to grab the file without logging in from somewhere, and since you can currently do that from Google Docs right now, then it's most likely to be possible as well. Maybe you also mean to have canonical URL's as well, and I think that might be something that wouldn't be there initially at least.

Well it better have a Linux client, and not require a web browser to be logged into Google+ all the time. Otherwise it'll be another G-fail.

Almost all of Google's products work over the web. The whole "cloud" idea is kind of their thing. Google uses a single login for almost all products now (the same one that's used for G+). Why in the world would you think that they would somehow regress and create a separate login for this that doesn't require the browser?

That said, nothing Google's done has forced people to use G+ when a browser isn't required. So, again, why would you suspect that they would do something like that?

If this comes with a client, I seriously doubt it's going to require that you log into G+, but the login you use will be the same one you use for all other Google products I'm sure (G+ included). If it has a browser interface (which I'm sure it will), then I can assure you it will use the same login that's used for G+ just like almost all of Google's web apps.

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