I stopped using Dropbox after the whole Condoleezza Rice thing and have been using a mix of Google Drive and OneDrive and I must say I like them a lot better. They do the same (and more if you use other Google Apps) and prices are cheaper. Are there any benefits to using Dropbox?
Are there any other real alternatives you could recommend to give them a try?.
Last time I looked at the Google Drive terms of service -- which was admittedly years ago (I ought to check again) -- they were basically unacceptable for me because Google were demanding a perpetual non-exclusive copyright license to everything I stored there which would have allowed for unlimited reproduction or use for any purpose Google felt like making of it. It looked like your standard boilerplate land-grab, and unfortunately it was incompatible with my business (which involves selling exclusive (but time and scope limited) licenses to use copyrighted materials I produce.)
Dropbox's copyright clause was much more tightly drawn and not incompatible with my business model.
This comment made me curious. When I went to check the actual terms of service, I found this line:
"Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours."
which is suddenly followed up by:
"When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps)."
So while you own your intellectual property, Google does take a copy of all rights pertinent to the work. It's hard for me to say why Google would do this; alienating what I'd imagine to be a significant userbase of content generators.
> Google does take a copy of all rights pertinent to the work.
A limited copy, only for use in "operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."
In other words, you agree to let everything you upload to Google be used for testing.
Anyone who's alienated by this shouldn't be putting content on non-owned servers in the first place. "The Cloud" isn't for your secret documents, it's for your family photos.
The show-stoppers are "... promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones".
Suppose I use Google Drive to store my current project, a big-ass novel that's going to see simultaneous publication by major publishers in a number of markets around the world. Google could in principle give it away for free to new sign-ups for their service as a promotional goodie.
Or "develop new ones" ... well, we already have Google Books: I am not sanguine about the prospect of a not-yet-published book of mine suddenly showing up in Google Books, or a next-generation incarnation of Google Books, without my say-so (or an agreement to pay royalties, because that's what I earn my living from).
These uses are certainly unlikely but they're not impossible, and that big-ass slab of lawyer-speak in the middle of the ToS is a show-stopper for me. Which is a shame, because if they'd just bothered to specify that the rights are for the limited purpose of [yadda] internal development of new services -- i.e. as test data -- I'd be fine with that.
Dropbox is a paid-for service that specifically supports business uses. It's ToS is acceptable. Google Drive is mostly used for free, and as the old saying puts it: if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product.
> Google could in principle give it away for free to new sign-ups for their service as a promotional goodie.
No they couldn't, because other parts of their ToS explicitly let you retain control over your copyright. You'd sue them, and win. Also, they'd lose all their customers and probably shut down the Google Drive program entirely.
Maybe we should just try and find a lawyer to interpret this impartially (something you should do anyway if you're trying to pick a ToS that's "compatible" with your needs -- you really don't want to get burned by a tricky ToS, do you?), but as far as I understand the whole point of this passage is to allow Google to use your data to test their products, e.g. facial recognition, translation, etc., in an automated fashion.
Exactly like Gmail, I am guessing the contents of individual user's drive accounts are probably scraped at regular intervals by machines for all sorts of purposes. This passage is a CYA for that activity. They're not looking for sneaky ways to get your book into their store.
I'm not saying "use Google Drive over Dropbox!", because I don't give a hoot. But the Drive ToS isn't why you shouldn't use Google Drive.
Of course they could, because you gave them a license to do so.
Facebook and Google do this explicitly already: they use your images and written content, which you presumably have the original copyright on, to sell their products and services (customized ads and the like). They haven't done it with Stross' novel yet, but the legal issues are the same.
The quoted license: "The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."
That sounds like it should be limiting but a new service can be "giving away copies of stuff we found in peoples gdrives". Would everyone hate Google for that, yes; would that break their ToS, no.
You retain copyright control, means they can't sell [other] licenses and such like actions - but you already gave them and their associates free use [wrt copyright] of your works stored on their systems. They don't need more rights to publish, modify, reproduce, etc., etc..
Indeed they can even effective sub-license by selling the right to be one of "those we work with", then the license you agree to also applies to that other company.
Such ToS enable evil to be done.
It is difficult to construct a ToS that allows the company to do everything it needs to without enabling this sort of thing. They don't want to leave the option you can sue them for copyright infringement if, for example, they share your copyright avatar image with a company that's using an embedded comment system or such like activities.
One can of course encrypt data before sending it to a cloud storage company.
> You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
Whatever anything else says in the ToS, this wins. Explicit statements always trump implications in contracts. You take that to court, show the judge, and you're on your way to dinner with your winnings later that very same day.
This ToS is not capable of Evil in the way you say. Period.
Also, they'd lose all their customers and probably shut down the Google Drive program entirely
While I agree with your thesis on the whole, I am sad to say that this probably won't happen. People will just think, "Well, I'm not writing a novel so this doesn't affect me" and keep on using it.
My interpretation of what they are trying to say is that they may need to modify stuff by wrapping headers on it and so on to make it work with their systems, but they won't steal your ideas or give them away.
My interpretation of what they are trying to say is that they may need to modify stuff by wrapping headers on it and so on to make it work with their systems,
Or: we make tape backups of data and tapes a shipped to some storage and we cannot guarantee that your data is immediately erased from all our infrastructure (including types) the moment after you delete it.
There is a youtube video from a google engineer that talks about their backup.
Your data is (supposedly) encrypted with your private key. They can't guarantee that all copies are deleted, but they can (at least in theory) delete the key to make the data inaccessible. Whether you believe them or not is a different story...
Yeah, Google would never just, I don't know, start republishing a bunch of books and, when authors or their representitaves complain, say, "see you in court." That's inconcievable!
>A limited copy, only for use in "operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones
also to:
>reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content
So not even family photos because you lose the right to keep them private.
"The Cloud" isn't for your secret documents, it's for your family photos.
Which is why putting your business documents on Dropbox may not be a good idea.
Also, it's kind of slow. Somebody at TechShop accidentally put a Dropbox folder in an Autodesk Inventor search list and slowed down launch of the program by several minutes.
I think many people in comments to your post not understand that "can" is not equal to "will". The rights they require are mostly for avoiding issues with some countries, testing, avoiding responsibility during hack attacks, removing duplicates and editing some files that could be browser open.
If anyone thinks that Google, multi billion company would take your photo and publish it to make money out of it - you are creating issues to yourself.
Its Google, they are all about your data, statistics, behaviours and keywords. Not about stealing things and using your photos/artwork for marketing purposes.
Cloud = trust. No matter if its Dropbox or Skydrive or Box. On the end of the day you either trust company or not. No matter what's in TOS.
Have you had any sync problems with OneDrive or Google Drive? After switching to OneDrive from Dropbox six months ago I've continuously had problems with OneDrive syncing correctly and resolving conflicts by silently dumping a copy of the file into the directory for me to sort out later. Worse it does this silently so I often don't know a sync conflict happened.
Trying out Zocalo now with better results but was curious if anyone else encountered this issue with OneDrive or if my experience was unique.
I had all sorts of sync problems with OneDrive so I canned it. I now keep a central SVN repository with all my stuff in it.
I use svn because TortoiseSVN tooling allows diff/merge of documents, it is centralised so there is a single source of truth and it works over WevDAV/http so i can access it on my mobile device if need be (I avoid this where possible and just use it as a tether).
I used Google Drive extensively, but found the desktop client lacking reliability. I switched to Syncdocs [1] which syncs to Google Drive more robustly and is way faster. Google's storage pricing beats Dropbox, but their client software does not.
I can't remember having those sync issues. I do remember a couple of times it was hard to tell if it had finished synching as it seemed to be doing nothing visually, that's the only issue I remember.
it depends if your talking about one drive for business or personal.
OneDrive for business is built on top of SharePoint and is well known to have a multitude of limitations and issues and I would never recommend anyone use it.
Onedrive personal I hear is much more reliable but I've not had any personal experience with it.
I use Google drive and have found it to be very reliable, when i have the odd sync issue (fails to sync 1-5 files out of 3000 files/150gb) i just click retry and successfully uploads them.
Is google drive an actual alternative to box/dropbox? I thought that if you uploaded (say) a .doc file, google drive changed it to a google docs file (which could be re-exported via docs->Word converter rather being copied out untransformed). This made me concerned that uploaded pictures would be down sampled etc.
I also seem to remember that if you click on a google doc file it opens a browser window rather than launching an app on your machine.
So I stopped trying to use it on my laptop. This system may have changed, or there may have been a way to avoid this.
I do use google docs/drive but only as a way to use docs that others have created and shared with me. I have noticed on iOS that opening docs shows a different set of files than opening the google drive app, which also does not reassure me.
It would be interesting to me if it were a true DB replacement. Of course since I now have to use Office 365 I just got unlimited Onedrive capacity so I may switch to that.
There is an option (and has been for a while now) to upload files to Google Drive without converting them to Google's formats. So your opaque binary blobs will stay opaque binary blobs.
That said, in my experience, Google Drive and Dropbox still differ on the handling of corner cases (e.g. symlinks, permissions and extended attributes, etc.). At the time I tested, Google Drive was lagging in most of these cases, but that may have improved by now.
At any rate: check that your use cases actually work before moving all your data!
Geeez, can we just stop with this, you are now giving your data to google which has your search history, email etc! If you going to have this stance, build your own solution and host it along with your own email and search engine. I personally fear facebook, google more than the NSA.
For me it's not so much about the NSA as about her involvement in torture and war around the world. I know me "rage quitting" dropbox doesn't change a thing but it means something to me.
I know my own solution would be the best and so an actual question. Would it make sense to use private servers (think AWS) to run something custom made or would that just be exactly the same (they would still be able to read my stuff)?
Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box. They are all the same when it comes to your privacy to be honest. I wouldn't "trust" any of them with very private things. I use them for convenience of stuff I want easy access to/share with family but don't want to just stick up in the public internet for all to see.
Dropbox lied about their access to your documents. Dropbox disabled password authentication for their entire system for a bit, by accident. I'd say that makes them worse than competitors. The whole Ms Rice thing might also make it worse for some people.
We should be using Tarsnap. If only they had a windows client (which I use as a hypervisor, as it has better power and driver support on laptops).
I find that Google Drive just doesn't work as well. We routinely get files that are "unable to sync" but manually retrying them works. I've seen it happen on OS X and Windows. I think it just doesn't handle locked files as well. Dropbox "just works."
Even saying that I'm still occasionally let down by how much of a power drain it is. Even wrote a utility to manage it (shameless plug)
https://github.com/joaomsa/powermonius
They are run by what is arguably the largest hosting provider[1]. It's definitely going to "work" mind you, but outside of EU the speeds may be a tad abysmal.
It's standard OpenStack storage and it's possible to mount FUSE drive, so no terrible client. I use it and have no complaints, just don't expect 1 ms read times as a mounted drive, etc.
Does google drive have syncing folders on all systems like dropbox where I can just drag and drop? windows, mac, linux, android, ios? I actually don't know, not being sarcastic or anything.
There is onedrive-d, but it's in very early development and can be a bit buggy. Fortunately the bugs manifest in duplicate files, not missing files, but it's a bit of a hassle to mange after a while.
That's so silly. Condi Rice is no worse than Zuckerberg or the Google people. If anyone thinks that Google or Facebook are somehow bastions of personal privacy, you're delusional. Condi Rice is actually an honorable person. I may disagree with her, but I don't have any doubts about her integrity -- contrasted with Google and Facebook.
As to your question about alternatives, I am starting to use Apple's iCloud Drive. Pretty cool so far.
I admittedly use Google products, but I am under no illusion that anything Google has, is likely fair game for the government.
Being involved in the gov't that started the terror scare and almost dragging my country in a disastrous war is quite something different than trying to nudge me into signing up for Google+. Torture, honorable, seriously??!
Are there any other real alternatives you could recommend to give them a try?.