I work for http://www.nomadesk.com, which offers easy and secure file sharing, wherever you are. I read these posts on Google’s GDrive with great interest and just wanted to add NomaDesk to the mix.

NomaDesk, trusted by mobile (“nomadic”) businesses for several years now both in Europe and the U.S., has similar features such as the ones you mention. We are convinced that the more data gets synchronized, the more likely it gets compromised. Therefore, NomaDesk includes an encrypted virtual drive that keeps your files securely available off-line and remote file shredding and IP-tracking with TheftGuard. Of course, we impose no limits on storage and bandwidth.A Mac version is on its way.

NomaDesk works with a local client and allows access to your files from anywhere on the web. We have very good reasons to work with a local client, next to the already “traditional” web interface (e.g., box.net, the late Xdrive, etc.):

(1) 100% availability of the data, regardless of network quality
(2) 100% performance when editing files, using any type of program
(3) 100% simplicity; just drag-n-drop files to synchronize and share them
(4) 100% security on the PC also: the virtual drives that NomaDesk creates on the PC are encrypted and can be shred remotely via our online TheftGuard service.

The bulk of our users, which are SOHO and SMB teams, appreciate the straightforward and secure file sharing they get through using the NomaDesk client software. You should know that in most cases NomaDesk replaces the traditional file server, FTP and VPN – with success!

Please let me know your thoughts.

Kind regards,
F.

Plus this is just another step to virtual’s – which are actively being started to be used. for producers and heavy users though, for a few years online drives will help, just please lets not give google more information.

With all the “cloud” buzz you have to remember one of the more important axioms of performance testing: bandwidth is not unlimited.

Let’s say your office needs to regularly backup 100Gb of data. Normally you don’t have to backup that amount every day, you do a differential, so 1/10th of that daily. An office of that size might have a T1; equally likely they have some kind of DSL. For this example let’s go with the T1, so 1.5Mbps.

Backing up 10 Gb of data over that line would, at best, take 15 hours. That’s too long to do only overnight, so there will be overlap with working hours; hopefully the backup software is smart enough so that won’t be a problem.

Then you do the weekly full backup – 100Gb of data, and it’s here where the cloud backup systems fail. 100Gb @ T1 speeds = 6 days of transfer time. So, forget it.

Obviously those are best case transfer times. If the office is actually going to use their internet connection for something other than pure backup file transfer, the transfer time is going to way up.

Some cloud backups let you “seed” the cloud, where you send the initial backup in on a tape or some other medium and just do differentials after that. Better, but still not very good. If you have a disaster 3 months after you seeded the cloud and all you did after that was daily differentials, guess how much fun it will be to restore everything.

These cloud backups work great for small sets of data. For any office with more than 10-20 Gb of data to backup, it doesn’t make sense to use them. Instead, you do what most companies do – you backup to some medium and take it offside, or put it in an otherwise secure location.

mg

It does exactly what you talk about – secures your data from disasters.

5 gig comes free. In the future you will be able to purchase more (feedback from the Mesh team).

It probably is one of the few services from Microsoft that doesn’t suck.
Has a very nice and userfriendly interface. You basically install and forget about it until the day comes.