This would certainly be useful to people like me with aging computers:
Google Inc. wants to offer consumers a new way to store their files on its hard drives, in a strategy that could accelerate a shift to Web-based computing and intensify the Internet company’s competition with Microsoft Corp.
Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives — such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.
[...] CrippledChimp.com | Last Daze of a Failed Regime placed an interesting blog post on Storage [...]
When I used to teach, I taught Thom’s Three Rules of E-Mail: 1) Short ‘n sweet, clear ‘n concise, 2) proper punctuation and grammatic structures, and 3) NEVER put something out there you wouldn’t want your mother, or the cops, to see. I’m surprised when anyone with a modicum of concern for security and personal freedom would consider otherwise.
Your best bet for disaster recovery is to go on down to Radio Shack and pick yourself up a 2GB flash drive for 29.95 and once a week or so off load your files and drop it in your pocket, or purse. On the five gig in my pocket (and the duplicate in my toolbox) are everything I’ve written over thirty odd years - academic, legal, technical, and my great american novels, much of it painfully reproduced from hardcopy - as well as encoded business and medical files (which for my wife I may need at my fingertips at any any given moment), and, of course, pictures of the grand-kids. The encoding is my own, which isn’t to say it’s unbreakable, so for the most part all but the photos would illegible to who would find, steal or otherwise access the key.
All your files in one place for easy peeking by the NSA. Is this really a good idea?
We already do this. Ever use Flickr? Or gmail, or yahoo mail, or email? It’s all on their servers, yes?
Right. And that’s why I never say anything in an e-mail that I don’t want to hear a prosecutor reading to a jury in a county courthouse.
We have a nuclear subbase near here. People who don’t realize that Naval Intelligence is all over the internet here are just plain stupid.
Migod, it would be like “Speak directly into the floral arrangement, please”. No thanks.
The removable flash drive is superior mainly due to the speed of uploading to the device, compared to the slowness of uploading to a web site.
I could see web site storage as a useful tool for collborative work. Upload just the pertinent documents to share with team members.
considering how cheap hard drives are, there is no excuse for handing over all your personal files for government scrutiny. sheesh, you can get a 1 gig flash drive for 25 bucks. that’s alot of text documents. i have 2 external backup hard drives, and one is going in a safe deposit box. and what does the age of your computer have to do with it? if it can access the web, it has a port to plug a drive in.