Google’s “enhanced” (read “expanded”) storage service amounts to very little. For $20 a year you can have 6 GB of extra space for GMail and Picasa Web Albums. Since the company had been upgrading everyone’s storage for free, this enhancement amounts to a real rollback of expected service enhancement. And it’s practically useless. I’ve been using GMail for years and am only using 280 MB of storage – I don’t need the 2.8 GB they currently offer me, let alone another 6 or more. And I’ve got my own online gallery, so I haven’t used Picasa Web Albums. The one area this might be useful for, Google Docs, isn’t currently covered. And this is nowhere near the “GDrive” rumors of last year! Wake me when it has an (official) drive mapping feature…

Microsoft’s SkyDrive was the other big announcement this week. It offers “drag and drop” uploads, but only from within Internet Explorer. Although the development team thought a real drive mapping in Windows would be a good idea (it’s buried in the comments), it’s not there yet. Although it’s arguably more useful than Google’s “service”, since it can be shared and can store arbitrary file types, SkyDrive still falls short of my needs.

Most other online storage services also fall short, offering special-purpose storage instead of allowing me to store whatever I want. Carbonite and Mozy (and others) are online backup; SmugMug (and Google’s Picasa and lots of other services) do photos. XDrive, the pioneer of online storage, still exists as a service of AOL. It requires a desktop client install, but does offer drive mapping. But XDrive has lots of customer complaints on the web, which makes me worry…

There are other options, too. Yahoo Briefcase offers a staggering 30 MB of space! AllMyData offers “unlimited” storage and backup for $5 per month. Box.net, iomega’s iStorage, MediaMax, and StrongSpace all seem limited to web or other weird interfaces. eSnips.com is kind of a community like MySpace for storage. Mofile seems pretty limited. Omnidrive seems best so far, but it’s still in beta and I worry about the company’s stability. Most web hosting companies also offer storage, often through the painfully slow WebDAV protocol, though Go Daddy’s Online File Folder seems interesting.

One service that really stands out to me as offering just the right mix of end-user focus, usability, and solid support is Apple’s oft-maligned .Mac service. Their iDisk is a mapped drive from any computer, and even though it’s primarily a service for Mac users, it does support Windows, including drive mapping.

So why can’t Google offer this kind of service? Why can’t Microsoft? Or Yahoo? Maybe because too many people would use them, gobbling up expensive capacity and bandwidth? Or maybe because mapped drives don’t have the ability to show ads?  Maybe people just don’t want to store their files online (sorry again, Hu)…

Or I guess I could just get a Mac…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Online Storage? Hardly!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.