Google Drive: Have Cloud Drives Lost Their Way?

Tags: Musings, Personal Thoughts

With this week’s introduction of Google Drive, the conversation about “cloud drives” has significantly increased amongst the tech community… But have we lost a bit of focus on what a cloud drive is ?

To me, and granted, I might not be in the majority here, there is a simple definition:

To be able to securely store and retrieve files (of any type) on the Internet (cloud) , and be able to access them from a device using the device’s standard file system (drive).

Any other characteristics and features are additional functions (bells and whistles) that should be able to enable/disable at will.

Please do not get me wrong. I *love* Dropbox, SkyDrive, Egnyte and use them all daily. I was anxiously waiting for Google Drive I am sure I will be using as well, but, it seems like none of these services hit on the basic definition of what a cloud drive is intended to be. To me they are more file synchronization tools and not really cloud drives…

It is so puzzling! I am no developer, but it seems like it would not be a significant programing challenge to enable this. I know, this last comment, would probably lead you to thing “what a complainer”, but let me just say: Perhaps, but opinions and feedback drive product improvements right?

Let me explain a bit more detail:

Background: Like most of us (well maybe not “most”) I use a desktop, a laptop, a thin client device, a table device and have several virtual machines that I use for one purpose or another (work/ test /learn / play) daily.

Goal / Desire 1: I want to make my file library available to all of *my* devices.

Options:

	Pros	Cons
Web-based access products like: egnyte zoho SharePoint SkyDox fileshare (so many others!)	No additional space required on device Ability to share files private/public + user/group	connectivity required web-interface login needed Not readily available
File Synchronization products like: DropBox, Box.net SkyDrive livedrive Google Drive	Available web interface Maps to a system level drive Library available offline Ability to share files private/public + user/group	Needs the disk space for sync entire library Files replicated across devices
Drive map to cloud storage products like: TNTDrive webDrive GroupDrive	maps a network based drive to a local drive No additional space required on device	Always on connectivity required permission management

Now let’s go one step forward:

Goal / Desire 2: I want to make parts of my file library available to other people/groups some public others privately.

Options:

Understandably, Of the above ones, today, web-based and file-sync are the best options.

There are two features which I think are driving the development of the current set of popular products, and thus the state of where we are. they are:

off-line availability
User and group permissions.

What about the ability to securely map a drive to “the network” and use it / go with it? (a true cloud drive in my opinion) — There has been multiple attempts to doing this over the years. and even a standard (webDAV) was created for it, but unfortunately nothing “really popular” – in Unix (and Mac) you can use native commands to map a drive. Several applications are available which have different features and approaches including:

Product	Brief Description
Gladinet Cloud Desktop	This product mounts any number of cloud storage, (e.g. SkyDrive, Google Picasa, Google Docs, Amazon S3) as local folders It is about $50bucks, but well worth it…Unfortunately, only available for Windows.
TntDrive	It allows me to mount Amazon S3 Bucket as a Windows Drive. This is a favorite of mine as it covers 95% of the Goal #1 above. Only available as a Windows client.
WebDrive & GroupDrive	both products by SRT, it allows you create a virtual drive that points to an ftp site (webDrive) or a GroupDrive Server. They now offer hosted version at groupDrive.net

[Side bar: Licensing on the above products can get expensive, as they are all based on a per device bases. Some offer free versions, but not all – or limited in capabilities)

Summary / Conclusion:

Will continue to use my TNTDrive / AmazonS3 as primary personal cloud drive and DropBox for sharing. The others will continue to serve as secondary online tools.

I must confess, I was really hoping Google Drive would be different (adding links to my Google Docs is just not that compelling) . I am still hoping community feedback would drive

If just one of them would set a folder property that would set that folder to “cloud-only” that would be nice! (I know easier said than done)