10 ms·
15 GB now shared between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos
- jaxbot 13y agoSweet. Now change the ToS a little and my gut will feel better...
- magicalist 13y agoI'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.
- sp332 13y agoIt'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.)
- sneak 13y ago> It's already pretty trivial to set up a standard IMAP client and sync all your mail to your desktop. No, not by any means. What magicalist is describing is "pretty trivial". What you are describing is a big pain in the ass.
- recuter 13y agogmvault.org or if you hate the command line, most desktop mail clients (Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird).
- sp332 13y agoWhat, 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.
- jlarocco 13y agoWhere is the pain in the ass? Launching the client, clicking on the Google icon and entering your username/password? Is it really so difficult?
- stevewilhelm 13y agoCurrently 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?
- nodata 13y agoIt'll take a little over 2 hours on a 10 mbit line.
- skorgu 13y agoUnscientifically 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.
- 3825 13y agoGoogle has published total "bandwidth limits" where they say[1] "To address migration needs, you can download your entire mailbox approximately 3 times per month." [1] https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1071518 https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=...
- magicalist 13y agoYes, 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 :)
- dunham 13y agoOr 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.
- davros 13y agoCurrently Drive just places a small json shim file on the disk, rather than syncing a usable document. If you use Chrome its easy to get Drive to store docs locally (but not images pdfs etc) [1] [1] http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1628467 http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
- RachelF 13y agoChrome will only store a few items locally, and often you still need a network connection. If you use Syncdocs [1], it syncs all docs locally as Word or Open Office files. It also syncs other files and Google calendars. [1] http://syncdocs.com http://syncdocs.com
- JelteF 13y agoI use insync[1], it also converts all documents, but why I use it mostly is it's linux support. An advantage to Syncdocs is it's one time payment, instead of a subscription fee. [1]https://www.insynchq.com/ https://www.insynchq.com/
- 1123581321 13y agoIf 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. https://socialfolders.me/r/k1pb5 https://socialfolders.me/r/k1pb5 (referral link; gives both you and me a higher file limit.) https://socialfolders.me https://socialfolders.me (no referral link; normal file limit.)
- raldi 13y agoOr 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.
- sp332 13y agoCan't you do the one-way import with Picasa?
- StavrosK 13y agoYeah, 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?).
- glopglop 13y agoThere is a Drive client for linux: insync. I use it since more than a year and it works perfectly.
- aacook 13y agoI've been using Backupify (https://www.backupify.com https://www.backupify.com) to accomplish just that. Actually would prefer the backup data to be elsewhere, not with Google.
- yanokwa 13y agoUse CloudPull ($10) from http://goldenhillsoftware.com 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 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.
- kidcoach 13y agoNow if they can just fix the actual syncing of files...
- pantulis 13y agoI feel Picasa is in a semiabandoned state.
- codva 13y agoI quit Picasa when they dropped support for Linux. Granted it was running under wine, but it worked.
- codereflection 13y agoI thought so as well, but they just pushed out an update at the end of March. https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/93773?hl=en https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/93773?hl=en
- TillE 13y agoGoogle 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.
- 1SaltwaterC 13y agoThey 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.
- yanw 13y agoPro tip: This change means you’re no longer limited to a 25 GB upgrade in Gmail—any additional storage you purchase now applies there, too.
- sp332 13y agoBut I still can't see my photos in my Drive?
- canthonytucci 13y agoNope, 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+
- justzisguyuknow 13y agoWhat about Google Play Music?
- codereflection 13y agoI still want something that will consolidate my free space between Dropbox, Live, Drive, Amazon, etc...
- kevingibbon 13y agoDon't be a cheap ass. All of these companies offer an amazing service. Pony up the $5-10 a month.
- codereflection 13y agoYeah, 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.
- eropple 13y agoThis doesn't pass the smell test for me. How many low-income folks and students are walking around with 15GB of data they need to be cloud-synced? As mentioned in the sibling comment tree, this smacks of pathological customer syndrome and reasoning backwards for it.
- artursapek 13y agoYou'll never get it because nobody wants users like you.
- sublimit 13y agoWhat's this about?
- artursapek 13y agopatio11 puts it well: 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. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who-would-rather-be-building-stuff/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who...
- recuter 13y agoThe 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. :)
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoDropbox 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.
- recuter 13y agoPrivacy 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)
- BrianEatWorld 13y agoI 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.
- mtgx 13y agoNot 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?
- bloaf 13y agoI'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.
- jl6 13y agoNot 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.
- zer 13y agoSounds like a good offer. Have they added an option to limit the download/upload bandwidth yet?
- cygwin98 13y agoNo, thanks. Bring back the Reader so we can talk.
- rlu 13y agoWhat 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.
- tonfa 13y agoIt 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.
- rlu 13y agoOh 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.
- tonfa 13y agoCorrect, instant upload shows up in Google+ (though I wouldn't be surprised if they make it surface in drive at some point, that could be convenient). Edit: and unless you check the box "full resolution upload" it won't count against your quota anyway.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> 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.
- 13y ago
- itafroma 13y ago> 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.
- skorgu 13y agoYeah 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.
- itafroma 13y agoWhile 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.
- skorgu 13y agoIt'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.
- nodata 13y agoVery interesting timing - announcing this before Google I/O.
- fpgeek 13y agoYes, this isn't the first thing I've seen recently that Google could have announced at I/O. Makes me wonder what they are planning to announce there.
- darreld 13y agoThis 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.
- rsync 13y agoWe (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. [1] New customers only, please.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jodrellblank 13y ago[1] New customers only, please. http://www.visit4ads.com/details.cfm?adid=32693 http://www.visit4ads.com/details.cfm?adid=32693 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H--tdhf1DPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H--tdhf1DPg
- corobo 13y agoFeeling a little stung as I've used rsync.net since 2009 and am on 72c/GB... :(
- rjd 13y agoTo 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.
- wfunction 13y agoThey'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.
- spinchange 13y agoIf 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.
- pfg 13y agoYou 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 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.
- spinchange 13y agoI 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.
- yashodhan 13y agoBullshit, whatever happened to the Gmail Infinity+1 promise? Remember that counter that promised ever increasing gmail storage? This move seems to contradict that goal.
- onemorepassword 13y agoSo 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.
- tempestn 13y agoThis 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%.
- davidweir 13y agoWith javascript disabled or on a text-based browser, there is no content on that page. What price accessibility?
- tempestn 13y agoHow 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.
- tempestn 13y agoFor $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.
- helloamar 13y agoSo now all the photos on google plus, Picassa are brought into accounts, that will eat up the bunch of space.
- godgod 13y agoGoogle 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.
- ramblerman 13y ago"Anyone know how to prevent googlebot from spidering my comments? I don't want an IRS audit." Unplug and go live in the woods. Everybody wins.
- Executor 13y agoIt would be cool if I could have all this data hosted on my web server/computers. Why give google your data?