This article from CNNMoney says that Google accidentally released information about its plan to provide a mirroring service for users' hard drives -- a service referred to as "GDrive" by Google-watchers.
The article says bloggers picked it up from a slide presentation inadvertently published on Google's investor relations web site. (I believe it was Greg Linden who first discovered the presentation and notes, as related in his blog entry "In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power.")
The CNN article includes the following quote from the Google presentation: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including e-mails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)." In the presentation, CEO Eric Schmidt evidently said that Google's goal is to 'store 100% of consumer information.'
Although some have expressed privacy concerns over Google's plans to store more and more user information, to me this seems like an inevitable direction. I'm constantly astonished and annoyed that in 2006 I am still tied to one isolated computer at a time, that it is so hard to get machines to seamlessly share information and back everything up securely.
CNN's article says "Google could save users from potential computer data crashes by keeping a 'golden copy' of user data on Google's centralized computers and rely on the user's local hard drive simply for speedy access to one's data, the notes state."
AB -- 3/7/06
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