Now Google wants to replace your hard drive
By John Lister
Google is reportedly planning to launch an online storage system designed to completely replace hard drives. However, there’s no hard evidence that the scheme is definitely going ahead.
There have been rumors of such a scheme for some time, though it’s never been all that clear which are fueled by genuine inside scoops and which are simply people assuming it’s ‘obvious’ such a product is on Google’s to do list.
The latest round of speculation, which has made it into mainstream outlets including national newspapers, comes only from a small nugget of information, but a potentially significant one. It comes from eagle-eyed users of the newly-released beta edition of the Mac version of Google’s photo-editing software Picasa. Upon its release, it contained a menu option referring to ‘Google Web Drive’, though this was removed the following day in an update.
While can be fairly confident in saying Google has at least considered the concept, the company is keeping quiet about any other details. And even sites which are calling it a done deal are listing the timescale as ‘this year’, which is hardly sticking your neck out when you say it in January.
Allowing users to replace their hard drive with a chunk of Google’s servers would seem like a simple extension of existing services such as Gmail and Google Apps. Logically speaking, anyone who is already comfortable with the privacy, security and reliability issues of Gmail should also be fine with having their hard drive contents stored by Google.
But I’m a Gmail user with a pretty reliable Internet connection who trusts Google to backup its servers and doesn’t have anything on my hard drive that would raise eyebrows among the police. And yet still my gut reaction to the idea of having all my data stored online is that it sounds insane.
It’s also easy to assume such a scheme would operate on the same policy as most Google services: free to use and with size restrictions that most users will never come close to. However, there’s no certainty that would be financially viable, and it’s possible a Google Web Drive would be a premium, chargeable service.
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January 26th, 2009
So would this mean to acess your own files you would need to use your download quota ?
I may have 250 gb a month of dl’s available to me but i can think of far better ways of applying it, that and i think my 6tb pc and 35 tb server has more space than google would ever provide me with.
I also cant see this being a safe option for storage regardless of what the files you’re storing are.
People seem to talk alot now about how the governments of the world will eventually be amalgamated into 1 global superpower that forces us to be micro chipped and runs our lives in a comunist fashion. Maybe we should be more concerned with google trying to do this ^^
January 26th, 2009
Joseph, I hope for your sake Google doesn’t read that. No one wants to upset Google.
January 26th, 2009
haha nice, lol
January 27th, 2009
So just how Google store your precious data?
On a bloody hard drive – only it will be their drive and not yours.