Are there any other real alternatives you could recommend to give them a try?.
Dropbox's copyright clause was much more tightly drawn and not incompatible with my business model.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well that's terrifying given that my phone uploads every picture I take to Google's services.
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 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).
Will look into Zocalo to see what they offer.
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.
Google Drive has a very unofficial yet supposedly usable 3rd party client at http://www.lbreda.com/grive/
https://github.com/Grive/grive
There is also a FUSE client written in OCaml:
Not free but its pretty cheap
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.
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!
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)?
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).
btsync makes more sense to me
For a somewhat less platform-independent definition of better. Neither of those has Linux-clients, which for some people is a no-go.
Which means I'll stick to Dropbox for a good while more.
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
Maybe someone can comment if they've used them in anger.
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.
[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-... (ctrl+f ovh)
Copy is ran by Barracuda. My only current grief is the lack of 2 factor authentication, but they have stated that is on the near roadmap.
Also, on my Macs Google Drive regularly crashes and is not able to upload some files (usually retrying works). With Dropbox I never had such problems.
Dropbox is more modular, IMO. I've seen some cool tricks to run websites, backup Instagram photos, etc, all from Dropbox.
Dropbox has a native linux client which can not be said for either OneDrive or Google Drive.
I use a mix of Dropbox and BTSync right now
archived storage on physical media you own
it's science
That's the end of my half-troll/half-serious response.
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??!