Xdrive is a service that provides users with a free "personal hard drive" on the Internet. It's an easy way to back up files, to store files such that you can access them from any place where you have an Internet connection.
Online data storage: an early view
I remember back in the bleak post-2000 Web Bubble 1.0 bust period, someone made a list of the dumbest ideas that received venture capital funding and hence, because the ideas were so stupid, yet significant money was invested on them, led to the popping of the Internet bubble, the collapse of the market for software engineers in the United States, the collapse of the computer book market... The NASDAQ, above 5000 at one point, even today lingers in the low 2000s, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average has finally started setting new records again.
Among the supposedly ridiculous ideas that got funded in the 1990s were vendors who promoted storage of data on their own servers. You would upload your data to their servers, they would store it for you.
The ever savvy analyst, I looked at the facts. The cost of disk drives was low and getting ever lower. My Internet connection was slow. Why then, would I ever want to wait and hope my connection would hold steady while I uploaded (or downloaded) massive amounts of data to a remote server who knows where, when I could just spend $100 and add another disk to my personal workstation?
The answer was quite clear. Quite. Online storage was a ridiculous idea.
Fast forward
It is an unfortunate fact that many innovators never reap the financial benefits that eventually accrue to the product that eventually embodies their innovation. Thomas Edison was penniless at the end of his life, while products based on his inventions were reaping enormous profits for companies that had joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average thanks in part to their implementations of his creations.
Ah.. creation versus implementation of, embodiment of, productizaton of creation. Creation happens due to visionaries. But in the economy, it is the transformation of a creative idea into a product at a point in history when that product's utility is understandable and accessible to a wide consumer audience, that brings the creation into widespread use. Then we acclaim the inventor -- but often little or none of the profits from the implementation that we are purchasing ever reaches the inventor.
Timing: the world changes, slowly
The problem inventors face is that they see what the world will need, often before that need is apparent to others, and before an infrastructure is in place that can support the invention and enable its utility to be applied. Cars prior to paved roads (see my "Of Cars and Phones, Motors and the Net" post) are a good example of an invention that entered a space where the necessary infrastructure was lacking.
My circa-2000 Internet bust assessment of online data storage was an analysis performed at a time when the infrastructure that would make online storage truly useful (fast Internet connections for budget-priced computers -- and simpler devices -- available from almost every important business location) was not yet in place. So, my head stuck in the 1990s, I looked at online storage and laughed.
Welcome, cloud!
Amazon talks about providing both data storage and computing services in the "cloud." What's great about the cloud? It's available everywhere. If I store my documents in the cloud, I can access them from whatever business site I find myself in, because they all have access to "the cloud."
Suddenly, what seemed dumb 7 years ago is "obviously" precisely what we need today. A few years ago we suddenly saw free email services bulking up their disk space offerings. Why? So we could upload streams of enormous attachments. I mean, Shakespeare wrote only a million words in his career, so his entire works require maybe 8 MBytes of storage space as a text document. You'd have to be rather verbose to need much more than that to store one job's email texts.
Free 2 GByte mailboxes certainly aren't for email conversations! Rather, they enable us to use online email accounts as document transfer and backup services. I regularly send intermediate copies of documents and code to my online email account, and I have my account configured so that anything that has "backup" in the subject line is automatically stored into a folder named "backup". So no, you don't want to send me messages (to that account) talking about "backup" of any type.
Xdrive
Xdrive eliminates the circuitous nature of my email attachment backups. Instead of sending emails to myself, Xdrive presents itself in the form of a disk drive, with folders and subfolders and files visible. So much easier than trying to scroll through hundreds of "backup" emails I sent to myself in the last few years!
Xdrive adopts permissions practices that let you share your folders and files. You are the sys admin for your Xdrive disk.
Then there's automatic backup. In the cloud, your files are backed up. Now, I know everyone who's reading this always takes the time to back up their files frequently, in multiple ways, etc. Yeah, we all do that, don't we? Don't you???
One more reason to store your data in the cloud...
I was largely right, but also very wrong
I proudly take credit for loudly arguing in the late 1990s on Silicon Investor that it was unlikely that Sun and EMC would see sales grow by 30% annually into infinity (which is what their 1999 stock valuations implied), and also unlikely that certain companies that had yet to see a profit were actually worth more money than established companies like Delta Airlines. But, when it comes to judging the value of the future of online storage -- I'll admit to being among the dumber students of technology at that time.
Amazon's Simple Storage Service, Xdrive, and I'm sure others as well, in conjunction with readily available fast Internet connections, are changing the data storage landscape.
Buy a new disk to store more data? No thanks. My backpack is heavy enough as is. I'll store it all in someone else's highly reliable, secure, regularly backed-up, accessible from almost anywhere data center, thank you!
-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media
question
what are the advantages of xdrive?