Mister Nifty

This is an obligatory post for Google Drive which is a direct knockoff of Dropbox. This week Google Drive went live to the public. If you know about Dropbox, you know everything there is to know about Google Drive. Other than wonky space sharing with their other services (Gmail, Picasa, etc…), Google Drive is an almost feature-for-feature knockoff.

I was a bit perplexed a few weeks back when Dropbox upped my storage limit to 16GB for past referrals, and I’ve never paid them a penny. They now give 500MB for each referral. I also noticed their new file sharing feature went live in the past two weeks for any file outside of the Public folder. It makes quite a bit of sense now. With Google offering a snazzy 5GB of space for storage, they had to up the ante a bit. Certainly Dropbox got the drop on Google to maintain customer loyalty. I wonder if there were elements of cloak and dagger with corporate spies – probably so.

Regardless of who beat who to the punch, I am not going to be using Google Drive. Google has enough of my info and now they want my personal files. Google, by default is a library. They index stuff, and they do it really well. They are notorious for using said personal data (emails, browsing history, etc…) for selling ad spots to advertisers. If you don’t believe me, watch the ads that appear in your Gmail. They are oddly similar to the content in your emails.

The more data we feed the Google machine, the happier it becomes. Google technically knows more about your personal likes/dislikes, habits/behavior, food choices, etc… than the FBI, CIA, and any other government agency combined. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, this is just the facts. The more services we subscribe to, the more information they have access to.

Google has a network device for sale that will index all files on your server for easy searching. They can extract pretty much anything from popular file formats. This is also what they do on the web every second of the day. Don’t think for a second that those same indexing technologies aren’t going to be used on your precious personal files. Google Drive is a gold mine for personal data to the which no company has ever seen before. If the conversion rate is even nominal, the amount of new data is astronomical.

The bottom line here is, think before diving in head first and putting all of your files on Google Drive. This isn’t some neat service they dreamed up to make life easier for everyone, it’s a genius idea for all of us to give them access to data they never could reach before. Privacy agreements quickly become antiquated. What you sign today will most certainly not be the same in a year or five years.

Google Drive is a close cousin to Android. We all know Android was a direct knockoff of Apple IOS, and now Google Drive is quite the same. I’ve included a couple screenshots to compare both menus. They are logically identical with a few semantic differences.

Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Email, email, email….how I loathe you and love you all in one. – Author Known -> Me speaking to my inbox at 5:30 this morning.

Most people have a backup strategy for their file systems, yet, many do not backup their communications. To some, email is a necessary evil and would rather user carrier pigeons of old to communicate, while others see email as the lifeblood of their operations. If you are the latter, you need to backup your emails.

This is not a difficult task. In fact, taking 15 minutes of investment now can save you hours of nightmare later. Here’s a simple plan on how to backup your email.

1. If you do not use Gmail already create a primary Gmail account. Gmail offers 7 gigabytes of free storage for your email conversations.
2. Create a secondary Gmail account as a backup email address. Set the user name to your primary account plus the word “backup” (i.e. myemailbackup@gmail.com)
3. Create a Yahoo email account which provides free unlimited storage.
4. Log into your primary Gmail account and click the Settings button.
   • Locate the “Accounts and Import” tab and add any external email addresses you want Gmail to check by adding it to “Check mail using POP3.” You can also forward or CC this primary Gmail account if you use another email provider. Either way, you need all of your external emails to come into Gmail.
   • Click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab and click “Add a Forwarding Address”. Enter your secondary Gmail account address.
   • Log out of Gmail
5. Log into your secondary Gmail account and click the Settings button.
   • Open the email that was sent to you by Gmail verifying that you own this address and click the link to verify.
   • Click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab and click “Add a Forwarding Address”. Enter your Yahoo account address.
   • Log out of Gmail
6. Log into your Yahoo account,  open the email sent to you by Gmail to verify address ownership and click the verification link.
7. That’s it! You’re done.

Here is the system we just set up:

We simply set up a triple contingency plan. If you can’t access your desktop or mobile email client, log into your primary Gmail account online. If your primary Gmail server is down (this has happened to me a few times over 5 years), log into your secondary Gmail account. The chances that your secondary account is on a different server is very good. Gmail outages tend to be targeted to specific servers and not the entire application. If for some reason, you can’t log into your secondary account, go to Yahoo! and get your archived emails there.

IMPORTANT! Don’t Delete – Archive Your Email

If you use Gmail as your primary email client, it’s important that you never delete an email to remove it from the inbox unless it’s junk mail. Simply hit the “Archive” button to make them disappear. You can retrieve archived emails through search or by clicking the “All Mail” link. With the space allocation, there is no reason to delete potentially important communications.