As Google continues to fuel rumor mills-a-plenty about the unveiling of its online storage service, now Microsoft is also in the mill. Google's rumored "GDrive" has been joined lately by talk of Microsoft's "Live Drive" service, which would also give customers the ability to store vast amounts of information on Microsoft servers far away from homes and businesses.But Microsoft's service is not a rumor -- the company has confirmed its existence. Up to two gigabytes will be available to Microsoft Live Drive customers for free, with more storage available for a fee, which has not yet been disclosed. With Microsoft starting to pump up its "Live" services in anticipation of the launch of Windows Vista, it better hurry -- the Vista launch, unless it slips again, will be here in January 2007.
Google's rumored service may just be around the corner as well. But the company has not even speculated that it may be working on such a service, let alone that it may ever offer a service like this. No surprise, as Google loves to launch products with little to no official foreshadowing . Will the online storage "battle" be publicly won by Google or Microsoft -- and will customers trust large chunks of data to either company? For images and documents not of a sensitive nature, I think they will.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-27-2006 @ 8:04AM
TomLee said...
You open with, "As Google continues to fuel rumor mills-a-plenty..."
And wrap up with, "But the company has not even speculated that it may be working on such a service,..."
I'm left to wonder if you should even be taken seriously about anything you write. People carp about Google's ad affiliate programs enabling a lot of clutter to appear on the web, you and Blogging Stocks seems evidentiary enough.
8-27-2006 @ 10:12AM
Brian said...
Wow TomLee,
Sorry to offend you :-)
Might have made a slight faux pas is a contradictory statement...happens. But, thanks for your correction(s). Have a nice day.
Regards,
Brian
12-19-2006 @ 6:56AM
Brown said...
Let these rumours be there. In the mean time, a trusted online service like IBackup can be used to safely and securely backup important personal files and folders.
With IBackup for Windows you can backup all your important files and folders either interactively or schedule them for a future time. As it does incremental and compressed backups, the network bandwidth consumption is considerably less (IBackup transfers only portions of file modified/changed). All backups are secure with 128-bit SSL encryption on transmission.
IBackup for Windows allows historical view of your data through use of its Snapshots technology. Once you enable the Snapshots view, you can view files stored in your IBackup account during the previous days under newly created directories and with appropriate names. You can restore the files that you need from these directories just as you would do from any other file or directory. You can backup open files, MS Exchange and MS SQL server databases with this application.
Coming to sharing, you can share files or folders with Web-Manager. Web-Manager is a web browser-based application for backup and retrieval of data from your online storage account. Web-Manager is extremely simple-to-use and you can use it to store, restore and share files and folders. Create sharable links with Web-Manager and send these links to those with whom you want to share data. You can also instantly ‘private share’ data with another IBackup user with Web-Manager.
IDrive maps IBackup account as a network drive on the user's computer and you can edit the data in your machine itself. You can also share data for collaborative access with others using IDrive. All you need to do is just create sharable links for the files/folders you want to share and email the links. IDrive for Mac is an excellent desktop interface for working with your IBackup account and Mac. Features copy-n-paste, drag-n-drop, direct editing and more. All you need to do is download the application, double-click to install, and start the IDrive for Mac application.