I’ve been looking into Google Drive recently. I don’t quite feel comfortable enough to haul all my files out of dropbox and dump them to Google Drive just yet.
However this is my opinion on the service so far. I like it, but….
Pros
- Dropbox has woeful security. Google drive is far better security wise. Using the Google authenticator and application specific passwords, Google Drive is immensely more secure already. I would be comfortable storing my important data in Google Drive without encrypting it with Truecrypt (which is what I do currently in Dropbox).
- It’s fast! Dropbox varies from reasonable performance to slow as molasses. At home I have a cable pipe that does 2 Mbits/sec up and at work it’s Gigabit pipe for uploads, so it’s definitely not the network on my end. I’ve heard this gripe from friends and colleagues.
- It’s cheaper. Google Drive is about half the price of Dropbox for storage space.
- Good Android Integration, well Duh….
Cons
- I don’t think I can state this strongly enough. THERE IS NO LINUX CLIENT YET!
- Did I mention there is no linux client? Google, if you make me wait 8 months like I did for a Linux Google Chrome, I will punch someone in the head. Or just write my own.
- Do I trust Google with regards to parsing my files to give me Ads? Dropbox still has to process the files to do dedup etc, but they don’t make money directly out of that.
- Why in the name of all that is holy, can I not attach more than 1 file into an email! I had to download the two files to my PC, then upload them to gmail. I could share the files, but I can’t trust the person is smart enough on the other end to know how to download files from a share link.
- Why oh why did you pretty much copy the Dropbox desktop client? Are you trying to steal people from dropbox. Surely you could have come up with your own client.
Keep an eye on this space 