Google Online Backup

There has been a rumor on the net and specially in the blogsphere (user generated blogs) about Google offering online backup and remote file storage services. This has been around since 2006 but has yet to become a reality.

The principles of such rumor are very well founded, as Google and other huge online companies have lots of servers that are being used for database processing, and therefore have their CPUs and RAM memory almost maxed out, but with lots of hard drive space sitting around idle. It just makes sense to start putting that space into good use.

When Google launched Gmail (their free web based email service), they started rising the bar for all email providers by offering 1 Gb of mail storage space, which was way bigger than the few Megabytes offered by their competitors at that time. When asked if they would actually be able to store 1 Gb of emails for each user, they said that they could store way more, and they have proved it by increasing Gmail’s quota (quota is the amount of hard drive space a user can use) every day.

They also added some “increased space” offerings to interested parties that would pay a small fee in exchange of having huge amounts of space to store mails (Gmail users), photos (Picassa users) or online documents (Google Docs users), however they still don’t have a “space only” offering.

There have been some external hacks and approaches to benefit from Google’s huge space allotments and use them for online storage, one of them is Gdrive, a small program that takes a Gmail account and uses it to store files by converting them to a mail-compatible format and splitting large files into several email messages. Although it works pretty well, there are some limitations, like the size of stored files and the speed, since when you want to retrieve a file using Gdrive, the program has to look into all emails used to store chunks of data for that file, download them and join them before producing a “readable” file.

Most Internet based providers are always aware of Google’s new ventures, as they know that Google is the “big giant” which has almost unlimited technology resources as well as a huge expenses account, so whenever Google decides to jump into the online file hosting market, we’ll surely see a lot of smaller providers struggle to survive.