By now, you’ve already heard about it: someone who religiously reads Google’s compacted CSS files found a reference to an icon called mini_webdrive.gif in one of them, and now everyone – including me – needs to post on their blog about how this hypothetical Google webdrive will enable us to do such incredibly amazing things as… store files.
I don’t know. Am I the only one finding it difficult to get excited about this?
But here’s something I could get mildly excited about: an API which would allow any site to store files on your web drive the same way apps on your computer can store files on your local hard drive, as scientifically illustrated by the following image:
This way your favorite services could write copies of your data to the webdrive location you provided. Not only would this allow you to seamlessly use files between any desktop and web applications, it would also mean that when another successful and popular web startup went out of business because their cunning business plan didn’t include making money, you wouldn’t need to worry because you’d know that you have a copy of your data safely stored on servers of a company which only occasionaly loses their user’s emails.
And finally, some sort-of related reading which talks about completely self-hosting clones of popular web apps, as opposed to only having separate storage for data, described above:
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No related posts.
It looks like the folks over at ma.gnolia liked my idea so much, they went ahead and lost everyone’s bookmarks, just to prove how useful it would be to have everything backed up to your own webdrive.
Read: Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline @ WIRED
Pownce is dead.
Long live Pownce?
Pownce being dead is exactly why I included it in the graphic. They are, after all, a great example of how having backups of your data from the cloud can come in handy.