Google: Hey kids, dump all your files over here with us! Google said that it will be offering unlimited storage for students on its Apps for Education service. The Chocolate Factory announced via blog post that it would be rolling out a series of updates to the Apps for Education platform that will include unlimited storage for students with accounts on the service. The company …
we do
It's called "buy and manage your own storage".
Too much crap to stuff in an external drive? then like a closet, probably time to clean.
Plenty of excuses why you "have" to let someone else do what you don't want to, but no whining about security and data mining because making backups is "too much work".
Interesting concept. Just think of all the data mining they can do. Then when the student hits whatever the maximum age is, they can hit them with "fees". Yeah... I'm a bit cynical of their motives. Is it all about education or priming them for the Cloud and all the joy that entails?
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> If I upload a document or picture to Google Drive, I can attach it to an email, and neither me (the sender) or the receiver has to ever download or upload anything.
Apart from you uploading it and you and/or the recipient(s) downloading it every time you open the mail you mean?
Other services already offer 50 Gb for free and even include client end encryption so there's less snooping. Google is convenient, but not the best.
I'd take Mega's 50 Gb indefinitely over Google's unlimited for a bit.
I'd trust Kim Dotcom and his MEGA service about as far as I could throw him - which is not very far.
To trot out the often-used quote: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product".
You've side stepped the issue that Mega is a paid for service after 50Gb and a certain amount of monthly transfer.
Sure you could trust no one, like in the X-Files, but:
1) So you wont be using cloud storage at all then?
2) If Mega does get caught betraying it's users, the business and the political capital that Kim Dotcom is working to build all goes down the toilet, along with the subscription users concerned about privacy too.
Fundamentally the percentage of us who have the skills *and* time to review code to ensure security is nominally 0%.
So what would you do? I presume you think Edward Snowden's idea of encouraging all developers to use encryption is pointless because we can't trust anyone.
When the shades of night are falling
Comes a fellow ev'ryone knows
It's the old dope peddler
Spreading joy wherever he goes
Every evening you will find him
Around our neighborhood
It's the old dope peddler
Doing well by doing good
He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today's young innocent faces
Will be tomorrow's clientele
Tom Leher, "The Old Dope Peddler"
"Unlimited" is actually marketing speak - you usually find some "fair use" waffle in the T&Cs, and from what I have seen, the reality is that they calculate at 500GB per person to size the required storage pool.
What amuses me is that people see that as a sort of local hard disk. First of all, there are no statements about how safe this is (as it's with Google, "not at all" seems to be a good guess), secondly, have you ever tried to haul 500GB over the Net? That is a lot of data to haul (for most older laptops and PCs that's pretty much all the local storage).
No thanks. Not today, not tomorrow. And certainly not with a US based provider.
The USA claims a right to see all data on USA firms' servers. This is being extended, pending the Microsoft Irish server affair, to servers anywhere in the world if any USA ownership can be established.
So they want students' data. Once a student is a customer, he or she is likely to stay a customer, including during a PhD or Masters course when the data may become much more interesting if the project involves research, industry and so on. Later, when working for a living, data from the student is likely to find its way onto his "cloud" service. At the same time, various official bodies in various countries are demanding the right to see data to protect us.
Also, imagine you are in the last few days of finishing your thesis and the deadline is coming fast and, oh no, the cloud service or network is down or suddenly too slow to be useful - will you have any come-back for the costly loss of service?
No, if one really feels the need to use such a service, at least choose one from a supplier and servers from a country with some idea of privacy and not subject to the USA (difficult). But, best of all, take responsibility for your own data, with backups. If you use universitz or school storage, make sure they have not passed it off to some USA network storage.
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