The “G” Drive
Jan. 2, 2007 by ravishan
I hope everyone had an excellent boliday break. I had a fantastic time. We visited our relatives in Jupiter, FL. The weather was perfect, we played a lot of golf, had a lot of great food and watched a lot of movies…
And I took the time to explore the best way to back up hundreds of digital photographs sitting on my hard drive. I have been backing them up on DVDs, but it has serious limitations, so I was looking for ways to do it on the net. I found picasaweb from Google to be the most convenient and advanced in its capabilities.
I have used Yahoo! photos a lot until recently, but picasa is much better. It is very Web 2.0 aware, so you can directly post your pictures to blogs, you can add captions, other tags, search the photos based on tags or captions etc. The ability to adjust the pictures for redeye and other things before uploading is cool… You get to choose if you want to share your pictures with others or not!!!
So I spent a lot of time uploading my pictures and soon I went over the free 250MB limit. So I purchased 6 GB space for $25 a year. Thats Cheap!!! What I got in the process is a very reliable backup of all my digital photographs on Google’s system.
So I naturally wanted to know if there is such an offering for other data backup. I know that there are hundreds of offerings, but I want to go with a company that is reliable and well established, so I don’t have to worry about moving my data around because the company is going out of business. I found Online Vault from AT&T, but it is too costly. $5.95 per month for the first 2 GB…
I wanted to know what Google is doing about it 
and I found out that Google is thinking about it and it is being referred to as the “G” Drive… It seems to be a rumor at this point, but there is plenty of evidence that Google is planning to offer this soon. I have been looking for ways to back up data on all our computers at home but have not found anything that is cost-effective and scalable. A GDrive would be perfect for us. Since it will be a for fee service, I assume that Google will have to provide privacy guarantees…
We always joke about how the concept of H and G drives are part and parcel of the Wesleyan users’ vocabulary… Here comes the ultimate GDrive and one of these days may be our own G drive will be replaced by THE GDrive!!! Yes, I know that it is Google, so we need to absolutely make sure that they won’t misuse our data etc. etc.
On a serious note, the fact remains that with faster network access becoming more affordable, technologies like these are eventually going to make the concept “Network is the Operating System” a reality and we better keep an eye on these developments and be prepared to take advantage where appropriate.