Google is reportedly testing a new storage policy that restricts new users to an initial 5GB of free cloud storage rather than its previous 15GB allowance. The change was first spotted by a Reddit user who was notified while setting up a new Google account that they would only get 5GB of free storage. The notice also mentioned that once the user linked and verified a phone number with their account, they would gain access to the full 15GB. Interestingly, Google’s support page does not mention this change and states that new accounts receive up to 15GB of free storage.

Google is yet to make a public announcement regarding the change in free cloud storage, however, it has given an official statement to Android Authority. As per a Google spokesperson, “We’re testing a new storage policy for new accounts created in select regions that will help us continue to provide a high-quality storage service to our users, while encouraging users to improve their account security and data recovery.”

Gmail now gives 5gb free if you sign up without phone number from r/degoogle

A crucial point to consider is that the test is limited to select regions. This may imply that the company is experimenting in certain markets where fake accounts and spam abuse are particularly high before deciding and rolling out the new storage policy globally. In all fairness, the phone number verification requirement does make sense, as it can help Google reduce fake or disposable accounts.

By requiring a verified phone number, users can be restricted from creating multiple free accounts for extra storage or potentially using them for malicious activities. Since verified accounts are tied to a recovery method, it also improves account security and recovery, which Google mentions in its official explanation.

Another possible reason for this change could simply be a tactic by Google to push more users into paying for cloud storage plans under Google One. While 15GB has remained unchanged for years, almost every smartphone user has far more photos, videos, and backups than they did a few years ago. Initially offering new users just 5GB of storage could make limitations much more noticeable, potentially encouraging more people to subscribe to paid plans for additional cloud space.

About two weeks ago, Backblaze sent out an email to its subscribers letting them know about the latest changes to its Terms of Service, and therein lies a paragraph that says that if your usage of the service exceeds "typical usage patterns" or "places an undue burden," the company may throttle or terminate your account, this despite the company's pledge of unlimited backups. There is no definition of what constitutes typical usage, so your guess is as good as ours. The company has also stopped uploading local data synced to other cloud storage suppliers. The changes come as the company has experienced a 40X year-over-year increase in AI data stored on its servers and has increased focus on its accelerating AI business.

Backblaze is perhaps the most popular home computer backup service, offering unlimited storage for a low monthly price and a simplified interface that backs up entire computers and external drives in one fell swoop. That's the sales pitch on the website, except the exact definitions of "unlimited," "computers," and "external drives" are all up for discussion thanks to the company's repeated ToS changes and possibly its market repositioning — and can lead to instances of data loss, as some users found out the worst way.

The new data limit might be lower than most would think. Data posted in 2021 purportedly by Backblaze's then-CTO Brian Wilson shows that storing just 2 TB would put you in the top 1% of users. It's been 5 years on now, and that figure has certainly changed, but even 4 TB isn't that many bytes in the era of affordable 20 TB external drives. Predictably, tech-minded users do not appreciate the change, especially given a price hike to B2, the company's business-oriented cloud storage, which is sometimes recommended as an alternative.

Knowing that you might be kicked off a service is bad enough, but it doesn't impose any losses on you beyond inconvenience. However, roughly six months ago, Backblaze enacted a silent change that made its backup app stop uploading local data synced to "OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, iDrive, and others."

The alteration was only published in the software's release notes, meaning that most everyone was unaware of it. Some users were caught by surprise by tangible data loss — quite the irony for a backup service, especially one that extolls the virtues of an actual backup versus a file sync in its own blog posts.

Developer Robert Reese found out about the changes in the worst way when he needed to recover data from his Git folders that had been silently added to Backblaze's file exclusions list. He then dug further and, along with other users, found that Backblaze never told anyone about its exclusions of file sync services or Git, and that it's hard to trust a backup service that can at any point unilaterally decide to stop backing up important data.

At face value, one might think that not backing up Dropbox, OneDrive, etc., is not a problem since you'll have copies of the files in those services, but then the difference between a sync and a backup rears its ugly head. First, most of those services only keep deleted data for 30 days, so if you only notice something is gone more than a month, you can't fetch it from Backblaze as expected.

Second, changes to files might fall into a similar trap, as most sync services have limits on age, number of versions, or both, particularly in the free tiers. Third, syncing files back to your PC might overwrite recent changes, and you won't be able to fetch the original copy.

Rubbing salt on the wound, although Backblaze is only meant to back up internal and external drives and not network shares, the client can trip you up in unexpected ways, as external encrypted drives are caught in the crossfire and likewise not backed up.

Other than "it's just business," all these changes might have to do with the fact that Backblaze apparently no longer sees home backups as a business priority. The homepage first and foremost touts cloud and AI storage, with the home backup service tucked away under two menu options.

Back in 2025, the company saw its backup revenue flatten as cloud storage grew and subsequently underwent a restructuring. The firm's latest quarterly results show that AI customers are making Backblaze a lot of money, so it's not hard to imagine the home backup service might be dropped altogether at some point.

A software engineer and developer, who previously accused Amazon Web Services (AWS) of a “digital execution,” has shared the good news that his data has now been restored. What made this impossible task possible was “one human being inside AWS [who] decided to give a damn,” according to data deficit disaster victim Abdelkader Boudih. The same insider source shared some interesting but worrisome insights about what went on behind the scenes during the days when robotic AWS reps insisted Boudih’s precious 10 years of data had been “terminated.”

‘Human’ contact made at AWS

In the earlier episode, we heard about an unnamed insider at AWS reaching out to Boudih. That character was never verified, though they apparently knew too much about this particular case to be a common prankster. Around the same time as we reported on the original debacle, an AWS employee had reached out via official channels to give hope that there would be some way to recover the precious data.

Tarus Balog was basically the first ‘human’ level contact from AWS, according to Boudih. Previous AWS-sourced responses were, in comparison, of a very scripted nature. However, Balog showed empathy and seemed to speak as someone with authority, telling the already long-suffering software engineer that leaders at AWS were aware of his data deletion blog, and were looking to make sure such cases were prevented, going forward.

Balog initially refrained from promising to recover the lost data, but cogs were definitely whirring at AWS at this point (August 5). The case was escalated to the top-level severity ticket available to ‘mortals’, and apparently the AWS CEO actually became aware of this particular incident at this time.

Account restored but tainted by 'deception'

The next morning (August 6), Boudih woke to the news – officially from Amazon – that his account had been restored. Though this was extremely welcome news, it was tainted with “AWS support’s incompetence - or deception,” according to the blog update.

What stuck in Boudih’s craw was the prior insistence of AWS staffers that all his data had been terminated. “The instances were stopped. Not terminated. Stopped.” Stressed the engineer, obviously angry about what he called “gaslighting” by previous AWS contacts. Moreover, his RDS instanced had been backed up as recently as July 19 – several days after support had insisted that everything was “terminated.”

Nevertheless, Boudih refrained from insisting AWS reps were outright lying. There was also the possibility that there was an “undocumented ability to restore ‘terminated’ instances - which would make sense as a safeguard against internal sabotage or mistakes.” There is also the excuse of AWS employee incompetence to consider, but Boudih seems to favor the theory that that prior support contacts “gaslit me about infrastructure.”

Story not unique – the shared payer problem

According to Reddit threads that spawned in the wake of Boudih’s dizzying initial post, this alarming case was far from unique. The shared payer model has inherent flaws, other social media users appeared to confirm, especially if one party defaults on payments due. This appears to be what caused the software engineer's AWS account and data to be suspended, then terminated.

Account suspension is "part of AWS’s standard security protocols for accounts that fail the required verification," AWS stated in an email to Tom's Hardware. But it didn't explain the apparent subsequent and rapid termination.

In the previous story, Boudih mused whether an account suspension could be escalated to termination, due to some billing issue with a previous shared payment party. That looks quite likely in retrospect.

'Terraforming, not destruction'

A software engineer has warned against trusting cloud data storage services in a painstakingly detailed blog post detailing their own “complete digital annihilation” at the hands of AWS admins. Developer Abdelkader Boudih, pen name Seuros, says they had been a fee-paying AWS subscriber for a decade, with the cloud service becoming a firm part of their workflow. Suffice to say, the developer’s long-standing relationship with AWS has now ended acrimoniously.

Boudih says lots of important data has been lost, including a complete programming book, electronics tutorials, and years of unpublished code. Boudih admits that “AWS wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open source development.” In other words, it was a tidy repository away from the “chaos” of the desktop. The dev reckons AWS’s multi-region replication and architecture should have been his backup…

Interestingly, Boudih claims they subsequently got a tip from an ‘AWS insider’ indicating that all their data was wiped due to a simple syntax error during a customer account audit, and all the correspondence Boudih had received about account verification was just a smokescreen.

It started with an innocuous verification request

On Thursday, July 10, Boudih received a verification request with a 5-day response deadline (countdown time included the weekend). Then follows a tale as old as time, where there are delays and escalations, verification ID requests, canned responses from the service provider not addressing actual queries, and so on. By July 23, Boudih was rocked as he received an “account terminated” notification.

Over the next few days of template-driven dialog with an AWS service team rep, Boudih was starting to worry that their data had also been rendered into “digital ashes.” Indeed, Boudih found out it had been wiped, and in the interim, reasonable requests for read-only access had been ignored. “Because the account verification wasn’t completed by this date, the resources on the account were terminated,” wrote an AWS rep or bot. Then they asked for a 5-star review…

Boudih highlights that this “20 day support nightmare” doesn’t seem to tally with AWS’s public policy of putting closed accounts on ice for 90 days, during which they “can be reopened and data is retained,” according to service provider documentation. However, Boudih’s account wasn’t voluntarily closed, but suspended by AWS for ‘verification failure,’ a procedure without public documentation.

'AWS insider' hints at a cover-up

We’ve already established that Boudih is a software engineer, but ironically, some of the open-source code segments Boudih has shared “probably run in AWS’s own infrastructure, making their systems more reliable.” Underlining the implications, the disgruntled dev added, “And they deleted the very environment that created them.”

Due to Boudih's status in the open-source community, Boudih says an AWS insider reached out with a fascinating backstory about what really happened in the AWS offices on or around July 20. According to this source, the initial verification request and suspension of the account were simply a smokescreen, as all Boudih’s data had already been wiped by accident.

Data extinction event

A Microsoft OneDrive user has taken to Reddit with a cautionary tale about their precious personal data in the cloud becoming inaccessible. Redditor deus03690 says that they have lost “30 years worth of irreplaceable photos” due to their misplaced trust in Microsoft’s cloud storage service.

In the discussion thread, the Redditor admits they may have made “a bad move” with their eggs-in-one-basket plan. However, to give the decision context they explain that they were moving house, faced space and relocation constraints, and were hemmed in by limited resources.

As a paying user of OneDrive, deus03690 has also been incredibly disappointed in Microsoft’s locking of their account without warning, and subsequent dead-end automated responses to questions regarding what happened. So, what did happen?

Consolidating before a major move

Deus03690 seems to have come face to face with a data preservation problem as a major move loomed. With a modicum of experience in OneDrive, and also having swallowed the Redmond “coolaide” [sic] at work, they thought they could get past a sticky data and life move situation by parking their precious data on some freshly paid for expansive cloud server space.

It is easy to criticize this plan, which resulted in a single point of failure, and is far from adhering to a 3-2-1 backup policy. But, life sometimes makes the rational difficult. Deus03690 later explains that they would be basically living from a suitcase for a time, had limited funds for physical backups, and they planned to restore the data to new physical data later. That would be, we assume, after settling down again.

“Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence”

With the “30 years worth of irreplaceable photos and work” literally vanished into thin air, deus03690 naturally expected to be able to get in touch with Microsoft to iron out issues and get the suspended account reactivated. So many corporations make real-human contact an impossible task, and taking this Redditor’s experience at face value, you might include Microsoft in that number.

To start with, deus03690 says they never even received a warning about any potential break of T&Cs, which might have resulted in the OneDrive account suspension. No light has been cast upon the situation since, with “No human contact. No actual help. Just canned emails and radio silence” – and 18 compliance form submissions, so far.

The Redditor then goes on to contrast the ownership / access rights to physical property with that of digital property. But they say they faced “a Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence,” so seem to hold little hope of retrieving their 30 years of precious data.

Indeed, when you pay for a service and are met with a brick wall the first time you want to iron out anything that isn’t on script, having no recourse to talk to a real human can be extremely frustrating.

Automated ban hammer mis-strike?

After a dozen years of court hearings in New Zealand, the country’s justice minister has announced Kim Dotcom will be extradited to the United States. Once brought to the U.S., Dotcom faces numerous criminal charges related to the now-defunct file-sharing website Megaupload. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the extradition order on Aug. 15, according to a statement from the New Zealand Minister of Justice. Goldsmith said he “considered all the information carefully” before agreeing to the extradition. Dotcom will be allowed a short period to prepare for his extradition.

Dotcom is German-born but lives in New Zealand. He and three executives from the Megaupload site were arrested in 2012 after a raid on Dotcom’s mansion in Auckland. These included the company’s chief marketing officer, Finn Batato, and chief technical officer and co-founder, Mathias Ortman, both from Germany. Also arrested was a third executive, Dutch national Bram van Der Kolk.

U.S. authorities say Megaupload cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted movies, T.V. shows, and music files. These files reportedly generated over $175 million in revenue for the website.

The website was also apparently used to share files among members of the U.S. military and other government workers. Investigators found 15,634 registered users with email addresses belonging to various branches of the U.S. military services.

After Dotcom’s arrest in January 2012, he lost access to 1,103 servers with around 25PB of data. A year later, he showed off “one of many racks with many servers” about to be launched for the still-struggling website. Each rack, he said, would be able to store 720TB of data.

Dotcom can still appeal the court’s decision. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), he lambasted that “the obedient U.S. colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload” and confirmed his battle wasn’t yet over. Dotcom expressed hope that he would still avoid extradition. “By the time the appeals are done, if ever, the world will be a very different place,” he wrote.

Ortman and van Der Kolk agreed to plea deals in 2023 that allowed them to serve jail time in New Zealand while avoiding extradition to the U.S. Batato, on the other hand, died in New Zealand in 2022.

Earlier this week Spectra Logic announced the Spectra Cube, a modern tape storage library focused on ease of use and maintenance while delivering up to 75PB of data capacity. The Cube is meant to have little or no downtime and allows the installation of new tape cartridge drives without powering off. The Spectra Cube supports Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier API access, and is stated to be ideal for "storage services by managed service providers and cloud service providers", more generally speaking. 

In terms of maximum tape storage capacity, the Spectra Cube leverages Spectra's own TeraPack tape cartridges with support for LTO-6 through LTO-9 and a maximum storage capacity of up to 30 Petabytes uncompressed. With compression, that's up to 75 Petabytes. The library also supports up to 16 partitions, intended for use in shared or "multi-tenant" environments.

Spectra Logic is set to demonstrate the Cube at the 2024 NAB Show, which begins today at the Las Vegas Convention Center. There will be an additional demonstration at the ISC High Performance 2024, which spans May 13-15 at the Congress Center in Hamburg, Germany.

"Compared to typical public cloud options," claims Matt Ninesling, Spectra's Senior Director of Tape Portfolio Management, "Spectra Cube solutions can cut the costs of cold storage by half or more, while providing better data control and protection from existential threats like ransomware."

This statement is provided alongside information regarding Spectra's lifetime guarantee on its Spectra Certified media (like the aforementioned Spectra TeraPack cartridges). Spectra claims more than 40 metrics are monitored and recorded for each tape in a library to enable data error assessment, to apply prevention measures, and fixes. Integrity verification checks should also protect data from being corrupted or lost, in theory.

Overall, the Spectra Cube seems like a quite modern choice for the old classic tape storage medium— but not without merit, if its pricing and capacity are actually to scale with the needs of you or your business. The official Spectra Cube product page seems to require you to contact them for an exact quote, which we don't advise non-enterprise consumers to do.

Google's cloud storage Drive platform is losing serious amounts of customer files without warning, the Register reports Several user reports have come up on the Google support page, complaining about lost files, with one user in particular losing data as far back as May 2023. Google has confirmed that it is tracking the problem but did not provide a schedule for a possible fix.

Complaints started rolling in exactly six days ago when user Yeonjoong posted a complaint on the Google support forums reporting six months of lost data inside his/her Google Drive account. A few days later, numerous user responses came in on the same post detailing similar situations. Many reported the loss of critical work-related files, while the worst reports involved years or thousands of documents going missing from their respective Google Drive accounts.

To make matters worse, users are also reporting lost files with Google Drive's desktop application, which makes a duplicate copy of a user's cloud storage on his/her location machine.

Data loss can be dire, especially for businesses or for files that are important to individuals, like family photos, resumes, or anything else you thought might be safe in a cloud backup. Google is monitoring the situation, but it is looking like data restoration for affected customers might not be possible depending on how things go. 

Problems like this are always a good reminder to back up your important data no matter what, even if it's stored in the cloud. Just because data is stored in the cloud doesn't mean it is completely safe. There have been multiple cases of data loss over the past years from reputable cloud storage providers, leading to thousands of dollars in downtime and lost work.

A poster claiming they heard from Google's support claims the company is monitoring the situation and is investigating the problem with its project engineers. In a best-case scenario, everyone affected will get their files back, but in a worst-case scenario, Google won't be able to recover any lost files at all.

Microsoft has provided an update on its Project Silica storage research. According to a recent blog post and video, the software and devices giant is now positioning Project Silica as a sustainable storage solution to address the cloud storage server market. Using Project Silica technology, it is possible to store approximately 1.75 million songs or around 3,500 movies on a palm-sized slice of glass. Moreover, Microsoft asserts that the 7 TB storage per glass sheet maintains data integrity for 10,000 years.

Several refinements have been made to Project Silica since our last report in June 2022. At that time, the media seemed identical in dimensions, but the writing process has since been refined for speed and durability. Also, we note the focus seems to have changed from music archiving purposes to cloud server data storage.

In the new video, Ant Rowstron, a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge, outlines the great appeal of Project Silica in addressing the ever-increasing amount of data being generated by humans and in cloud storage.

Sketching out the limitations of magnetic storage, a traditional cloud server data medium, Rowstron highlights the need to refresh the data every five years when using HDDs and up to ten years “if you are brave” with tape storage. Refreshing media can be arduous, wastes energy, and introduces the potential for data corruption.

In contrast, data stored in glass, with its natural resistance to water, electromagnetic pulses, extreme temperatures, and surface scratching, can be stable for thousands of years.

The video also takes us through the four steps to silicon storage heaven. There are four ‘labs’ involved in Project Silica data storage and retrieval, as follows:

1. Write Lab: short laser pulses record data inside the glass as voxels (3D pixels)
2. Read Lab: a computer controlled microscope reads data
3. Decode Lab: here the data read is decoded back into standard computer readable formats using Azure AI
4. Library lab: when data is requested for recall, a robot in the library goes to fetch the appropriate piece, and inserts it into a reader.

It is emphasized that the library is immutable and passive. All the complexity and power in the system is in the robot. We wondered what would happen if a robot fell or dropped a slice of glass, but Microsoft’s blog doesn’t discuss this possibility.

Last but not least, it is interesting to note Microsoft’s change of direction and some quite incredible claims for Project Silica. The firm admits it still isn’t ready for commercial use, though. It envisions glass storage as “a mainstay in Azure data centers across the globe” that needs another three of four developmental stages to secure its place and live up to its durable, sustainable, and cost-effective potential.

Immersion cooling specialist Iceotope has published a study sharing its findings in the wake of a series of tests completed at one of Meta’s (Facebook) data centers. The study looked carefully at the pros and cons of precision single-phase immersion cooling in businesses that use high-density data storage servers. Iceotope asserts that its results were “conclusive” in demonstrating this cooling methodology is a superior solution when compared to air cooling, as well as other forms of liquid cooling such as cold plates, tank immersion, or two-phase immersion.

HDDs are still in high demand in data centers, with Seagate saying that 90% of cloud storage uses this mechanical magnetic storage technology. At the same time, consumer demand for higher bitrate content, and the generation of storage-hungry new content (photos, videos, etc) will continue to ramp up for the foreseeable future. Thus it is important for companies like Meta, who partnered with Iceotope for this study, to optimize storage facilities with regard to reliability, efficiency, and total cost of ownership (TCO).

In the tests, a standard air-cooled commercial storage system with 72 HDDs and supporting components was re-engineered to work with Iceotope’s precision single-phase immersion cooling. Specifically, the modified system used a dedicated dielectric loop connected to a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger and pump. Single-phase cooling is much simpler than dual-phase - where the coolant boils from liquid to gas, travels into a condenser and then flows back into the system (hence dual-phase). Instead with single-phase, the coolant just flows around the hotter and cooler areas of the loop, doing its job without any phase change.

Four main observations were made by the Iceotope testing team. Firstly, the 72 HDDs showed very little variance in temperature (just 3° C) wherever they were located in the server array. It is important to highlight that the storage array used hermetically sealed helium-filled HDDs. Secondly, the liquid could climb in temperature to an easily manageable 40°C with no impact on reliability. Thirdly, the power consumption of the cooling system was <5% of the system total. Lastly, it was noticed that the single-phase precision cooling was virtually silent and vibration free.

Overall, these benefits can lead to improved TCO figures and greater reliability of the storage hardware. Thanks to the demonstrable benefits,  Iceotope’s solution can also be beneficial to a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) regulatory evaluations.

But of course, this is a study undertaken by a company that sells this service. So take it with a few grains of salt. And let huge companies like Meta incur conversion and cooling costs for at least a few years before deciding it's worth it to liquid-cool the media collection currently sitting on your NAS drive. 

The Decentralized Storage Alliance was born Tuesday — promising cooperation between major technology players to facilitate the transition between Web2 and Web3. The major thrust of this initiative, indicated by its name, is in evolving decentralized storage, driving awareness of this technology, and promoting its adoption. Major technology partners include AMD, Seagate, Ernst & Young, Protocol Labs, and the Filecoin Foundation.

AMD's role in the Web3 tech coven is leveraging its expertise in high-performance and adaptive processor technologies — combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs, and deep software integration. This expertise is expected to be instrumental in the future success of decentralized storage.

Seagate is a well-known provider of physical storage technology, and has been even before the days of Web1. Its solutions range from home users to businesses and even to the cloud providers (Web2), which this newer technology hopes to displace. It's wise for Seagate to get onboard and be a guiding member of this alliance from the beginning if — as expected — decentralized storage does take off one day.

Investments and accountancy firm Ernst & Young will take on the role of guiding and developing secure blockchain technology for storage, to benefit its customers. 

The above trio, alongside alliance founders Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation, aim to set up a widely-adopted foundation for decentralized storage by embarking on the following tasks: 

• Developing standard specifications and reference architectures that address the unique needs of enterprise companies.
• Providing access to education materials, technical resources, and best practices.
• Improving the process of onboarding data to decentralized storage networks and making it easier for new data centers to onboard to the network.
• Enabling the creation of impactful Working Groups that solve specific issues with the transition to decentralized storage technologies and Web3.

Why would you be interested in decentralized storage? This storage technology promises a Web3 version of the cloud — offering great efficiency and robust security, as well as a "significantly lower" cost. Its decentralized nature means that uses of this storage tech aren't locked in to a provider — they will meet data sovereignty requirements, and will benefit from other advantages inherent in the blockchain.

Filecoin is the largest provider of this type of service: Filecoin says it hosts 240 PiB of data, which is approximately 65,000 Wikipedia's worth of data. Its customers number in the thousands, and include UC Berkeley, USC's Shoah Foundation, and the University of Utah. It seems like the Decentralized Storage Alliance is off to a good start.

Dropbox, the cloud storage provider, has announced it has been the target of a phishing attack that successfully accessed its private GitHub repos. GitHub was able to quickly notify Dropbox of the attack, and no customer data or passwords were affected.

The data breach took place on October 13, with Dropbox becoming aware that things were amiss the next day. The attackers impersonated the CircleCI integration and delivery platform that can be logged into using GitHub credentials, bombarding Dropbox staff with realistic-looking phishing emails. Many of them were blocked by Dropbox’s internal systems, but some got through - enough, it seems, for at least one employee to visit a fake CircleCI login page, enter their GitHub credentials, and use a hardware authentication key to pass a one-time password to the malicious site.

This allowed the attacker into Dropbox’s private Github area, from where they copied 130 code repositories. Data accessed includes, according to Dropbox’s statement: “...some credentials—primarily, API keys—used by Dropbox developers. [It] also included a few thousand names and email addresses belonging to Dropbox employees, current and past customers, sales leads, and vendors.”  Then later: “These repositories included our own copies of third-party libraries slightly modified for use by Dropbox, internal prototypes, and some tools and configuration files used by the security team. Importantly, they did not include code for our core apps or infrastructure. Access to those repositories is even more limited and strictly controlled.” 

Back in September, GitHub warned its users in a blog post about attacks targeted at CircleCI, noting that “If the threat actor successfully steals GitHub user account credentials, they may quickly create GitHub personal access tokens (PATs), authorize OAuth applications, or add SSH keys to the account in order to preserve access in the event that the user changes their password.”

Dropbox was able to cut off the attackers’ access on the same day it found out about the intrusion, and believes the risk to customers is minimal. The company is also upgrading its multi-factor authentication method to WebAuthn—a change already in progress when the attack happened. 

If you're a current Amazon Drive customer, you might want to think about offloading your files from the cloud service sooner rather than later. Amazon just sent out an email informing customers that the service will be discontinued on December 31, 2023, giving you just over a year to get your affairs in order.

"Over the last 11 years, Amazon Drive has served as a secure cloud storage service for Amazon customers to back up their files," said Amazon in the email sent to current Amazon Drive customers. "On December 31, 2023, we will no longer support Amazon Drive to more fully focus our efforts on photos and video storage with Amazon Photos."

For those unfamiliar with Amazon Drive, it enables every Amazon customer to upload 5GB of files for free. In the case of Amazon Drive, customers can securely store photos, videos, and documents in the cloud. PC and Mac users can upload and download files to Amazon Drive using a web browser, while Android and iOS users can interface with the service using an app.

While 5GB of storage is provided for free, Amazon offers paid tiers starting at $1.99/month for 100GB on up to $11.99/month for 2TB of Amazon Drive storage. 

"We will continue to provide customers the ability to safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with Amazon Photos," Amazon continued in its email. Amazon Photos is similar in concept to Amazon Drive, except that it only allows customers to upload photos and video. 

One perk of Amazon Photos is that customers with a Prime membership can access unlimited photo storage. On the other hand, Prime members are limited to just 5GB of free video storage. If you want to increase your Amazon Photos video storage with a Prime membership, additional storage starts at $1.99/month for 100GB.

With the impending demise of Amazon Drive, it's probably a good time to look at alternative cloud storage solutions for your documents like Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, or iCloud Drive (if you're an Apple user).

While it will come as no comfort to those who had their Western Digital My Book Live NAS drives wiped last week, it seems they were attacked by a combination of two exploits, and possibly caught in the fallout of a rivalry between two different teams of hackers. 

Initially, after the news broke on Friday, it was thought a known exploit from 2018 was to blame, allowing attackers to gain root access to the devices. However, it now seems that a previously unknown exploit was also triggered, allowing hackers to remotely perform a factory reset without a password and to install a malicious binary file.

A statement from Western Digital, updated today, reads: “My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are under attack by exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities present in the device ... The My Book Live firmware is vulnerable to a remotely exploitable command injection vulnerability when the device has remote access enabled. This vulnerability may be exploited to run arbitrary commands with root privileges. Additionally, the My Book Live is vulnerable to an unauthenticated factory reset operation which allows an attacker to factory reset the device without authentication. The unauthenticated factory reset vulnerability [has] been assigned CVE-2021-35941.”

Analysis of WD’s firmware suggests code meant to prevent the issue had been commented out, preventing it from running, by WD itself, and an authentication type was not added to component_config.php which results in the drives not asking for authentication before performing the factory reset. 

The question then arises of why one hacker would use two different exploits, particularly an undocumented authentication bypass when they already had root access through the command injection vulnerability, with venerable tech site Ars Technica speculating that more than one group could be at work here, with one bunch of bad guys trying to take over, or sabotage, another’s botnet. 

Western Digital has responded admirably, offering data recovery services beginning in July, and a trade-in program to switch the obsolete My Book Live drives for more modern My Cloud devices. 

If you own one of the affected devices, do not connect it to the Internet and contact Western Digital for support.

Owners of Western Digital My Book Live drives are being advised to unplug them from the internet today, after some users woke up to find their previously data-filled drives were looking suspiciously empty, with users taking to the company’s support forum to report the issue.

If the data loss wasn’t enough, My Book Live owners are also reporting that their passwords no longer work to open up the drive’s admin console, some users also report that the default admin passwords also no longer work. One user has reported that a message in the GUI “says it was ‘Factory reset’ today”. The My Book Live and My Book Live Duo are older products, and no longer supported by Western Digital, but are apparently still being used as a backup solution by many.

Jun 23 15:14:05 MyBookLive factoryRestore.sh: begin script:Jun 23 15:14:05 MyBookLive shutdown[24582]: shutting down for system rebootJun 23 16:02:26 MyBookLive S15mountDataVolume.sh: begin script: startJun 23 16:02:29 MyBookLive _: pkg: wd-nasJun 23 16:02:30 MyBookLive _: pkg: networking-generalJun 23 16:02:30 MyBookLive _: pkg: apache-php-webdavJun 23 16:02:31 MyBookLive _: pkg: date-timeJun 23 16:02:31 MyBookLive _: pkg: alertsJun 23 16:02:31 MyBookLive logger: hostname=MyBookLiveJun 23 16:02:32 MyBookLive _: pkg: admin-rest-api

Console log from WD My Book Live owner Sunpeak via WD Forums

Western Digital released the following statement on its support forum: “Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live devices are being compromised by malicious software. In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device. The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015. We understand that our customers’ data is very important. At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live from the Internet to protect your data on the device. We are actively investigating and we will provide updates to this thread when they are available.”

In an email seen by Ars Technica, Western Digital say that the incident is "under active investigation" and "We do not have any indications of a breach or compromise of Western Digital cloud services or systems."

My Book Live devices were an early form of ‘personal cloud’ storage, and ranged in capacity from one to three terabytes, with the Duo model available up to eight TB. They were designed to plug into your home network via Ethernet, to be accessed by any device that was also connected, and it could run automatic backups, DLNA streaming, and even an iTunes media server. Duo devices could use RAID-1 for safer backups. They also offered secure remote access over the internet.

When you work hard on a Raspberry Pi project, you’ll want to make a complete disk backup of the entire OS and software, not just your code. Even the best Raspberry Pi microSD cards can fail or get lost and you may also want to re-use the project on another card or share it with others. For example, at Tom’s Hardware, we have a Raspberry Pi web server we use for battery tests and we have multiple Pis that all have the same exact image.

There are a few ways to backup a Raspberry Pi. You can use Raspberry Pi OS’s SD Card Copier app, which is under the Accessories section of the Start menu, to clone your microSD card directly to another microSD card. But unless you need a second card right away, it’s a better idea to create a disk image: a file you can store on a PC or in the cloud, distribute to others and write to a new microSD card at any time, using Etcher or Raspberry Pi Disk Imager.

Some folks recommend taking your microSD card, sticking it in a Windows PC and copying it sector-for-sector with Win32 Disk Imager, but that creates two problems. First, the card you are writing to has to be exactly the same size as the one you backed up or larger. Because there are subtle differences in the number of sectors on different makes and models of card, a 32GB San Disk card may have a few more sectors than a 32GB Samsung card and, if the destination card is smaller, the copy process won’t work properly and the card won’t boot. Second, your backup file will be huge: the full size of your card, even if you only were using 3 out of 32GB.

Fortunately, there’s a way to create a compressed disk image that’s even smaller than the amount of used space on the source microSD card you’re backing up. To create the disk image, you’ll need an external USB drive to connect to your Raspberry Pi and write it to. If the USB drive is a higher capacity than the source microSD card (ex: a 32GB USB drive to image a 16GB card), you can back up the whole card before shrinking it. However, if you don’t have a USB drive that’s big enough, check out the section at the bottom of this article on shrinking your rootfs partition. 

 How to Make a Raspberry Pi Disk Image 

1.  Format a USB Flash or the best hard drive as either NTFS (if you are using Windows on your PC and plan to read this drive on a PC) or EXT4 (for Linux). Make sure the Flash drive is larger than the capacity of the used space. Make sure to give the drive a volume name that you remember (ex: “pibkup” in our case). You can also format the drive directly on the Raspberry Pi if you like.  

2.  Connect the USB drive to your Raspberry Pi.

3. Install pishrink.sh on your Raspberry Pi and copy it to the /usr/local/bin folder by typing: 

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Drewsif/PiShrink/master/pishrink.shsudo chmod +x pishrink.shsudo mv pishrink.sh /usr/local/bin

 4. Check the mount point path of your USB drive by entering 

lsblk

You’ll see a list of drives connected to the Raspberry Pi and the mount point name of each. Your USB drive will probably be mounted at /media/pi/[VOLUME NAME]. In our case, it was /media/pi/pibkup. If your drive isn’t mounted, try rebooting with the USB drive connected or you can mount it manually by typing sudo mkdir /dev/mysub to create a directory and sudo mount /dev/sda1 /dev/myusb to mount it. However, you can’t and shouldn’t do  that if it’s already mounted.

5. Copy all your data to an img file by using the dd command. 

sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=[mount point]/myimg.img bs=1M

However, if you shrank a partition on the source microSD card, you’ll need to use the count attribute to tell it to copy only as many MBs as are in use. For example, in our case, we had had a 16GB card, but after shrinking the rootfs down to 6.5GB, the card only had about 6.8GB in use (when you count the /boot partition). So, to be on the safe side (better to copy too much data than too little), we rounded up and set dd to copy 7GB of data by using count=7000. The amount of data is equal to count * block size (bs) so 7000 * 1M means 7GB. 

sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=[mount point]/myimg.img bs=1M count=7000

Only do this if you have previously shrunk the partition. If you use count and copy less than the full partition you could have an incomplete image that's missing data or won't boot. 

6. Navigate to the USB drive's root directory.

cd /media/pi/pickup

7.  Use pishrink with the -z parameter, which zips your image up with gzip. 

sudo pishrink.sh -z myimg.img

This process will also take several minutes but, when it is done, you will end up with a reasonably sized image file called myimg.img.gz. You can copy this file to your PC, upload it to the cloud or send it to a friend.  

How to Shrink a Partition on Raspberry Pi 

If you want to make a disk image of a microSD card, but don’t have an external USB drive of a greater capacity, you have a problem. Even though the eventual .img.gz file you create in the tutorial above should be much smaller than your source card, you still need enough space to accommodate the uncompressed .img file as part of the process. 

What’s particularly frustrating is that, by default, the dd file copy process makes an image out of ALL the space on your microSD card, even the unused space.For example, you might have a 64GB microSD card, but only be actually using 6GB of space. If you don’t shrink the rootfs partition, you will end up copying all 64GB over to your external drive, which will take a lot more time to complete and will require that you have at least 65GB of free space. 

So the solution is to shrink the rootfs partition of your microSD card down to a size that’s just a little bit bigger than the amount of used space. Then you can copy just your partitions over to the USB drive.

To do the shrinking, you’ll need a USB microSD card reader and a second microSD card with Raspberry Pi OS on it.

1. Put your source microSD card (the one you want to copy) in a reader and connect to your Raspberry Pi.

2. Boot your Raspberry Pi off a different microSD card.

3. Install gparted on your Raspberry Pi.

sudo apt-get install gparted -y

4.  Launch gparted from within the Raspberry Pi OS GUI. It’s in the System Tools section of the start menu. 

5.  Select your external microSD card from the pull down menu in the upper right corner of the gparted window. 

6. Unmount the rootfs partition if it is mounted (a key icon is next to it) by right clicking it and selecting Unmount from the menu. If the option is grayed out, it’s not mounted. 

7.  Right click rootfs and select Resize / Move. 

8.  Set the new size for the partition as the minimum size or slightly larger and click Resize.. Note that gparted may overreport the amount of used space (when we unmounted a partition with 4.3GB used, it changed to say 6GB were in use), but you have to go with at least its minimum. 

9.  Click the green check mark in the gparted window and click Apply (when warned) to proceed. 

10. Shutdown the Raspberry Pi.

11. Remove the source microSD card from the USB card reader and insert it into the Raspberry Pi to boot from.

12. Follow the instructions in the section above on creating a disk image. Make sure to use the count attribute in step 5. 

 Writing Your Raspberry Pi Disk Image to a Card 

 Once you’re done, you’ll have a file with the extension .img.gz and you can write or “burn” it to a microSD card the same way you would any .img file you download from the web. The easiest way to burn a custom image is to: 

1.  Launch Raspberry Pi Imager on your PC. You can download Raspberry Pi Imager if you don’t have it already. 

2.  Select Use custom from the Choose OS menu. 

3.  Select your .img.gz file. 

4.  Select the microSD card you wish to burn it to. 

5.  Click Write. 

Backblaze, a data storage provider, has amassed so much customer data over the years that it now has over 1 exabyte (EB) of storage. 

With a byte being a single unit of digital storage, 1EB is the equivalent of 1 billlion gigabytes  (GB) or 1 million of your lofty 1TB hard drives. As BackBlaze puts it, if 1GB is like the size of Earth, 1EB is like the size of the sun. If you were to start a video call, it would have to last 237,823 years to fill up 1EB. 

Today, Backblaze is one of the very few companies that has a storage capacity of 1EB. According to ZDNet, the first 1EB storage system came via Oracle in 2011. It's more complicated than you may think. Backblaze invested a lot of time and money to get to 1EB. For starters, you need to have the appropriate infrastructure to accommodate all the hard drives. Furthermore, hard drives often fail, and the company has to replace them.

Backblaze started as a five-person crew back in 2007 in one of the co-founder's apartments. The company has now grown to 145 employees with customers in over 160 different countries. 

Backblaze's 1EB arsenal is spread across 125,000 hard drives with capacities spanning from 4TB to 14TB. The firm utilizes models from all the big-name brands, such as Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST).

1EB is cool and all, but Backblaze has already set its eyes on reaching 1 zettabyte (ZB) or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, depending on how you want to look at it.

At Google I/O 2019 this week, Google announced that its Cloud TPU (tensor processing unit) pods, featuring both the 2nd and 3rd generations of its TPU chips, are now available in public beta on its Google Cloud Platform. 

Cloud TPU Pods With 1,000 TPUs

TPUs are ASICs Google developed for machine learning workloads. When Google first announced its TPU chip in 2016, it was a revelation in terms of inference performance. The chip showed up to 30 times higher performance than an Nvidia Kepler GPU (which lacked any optimization for inference at the time) and 80 times the performance of an Intel Haswell CPU. In 2017, Google announced the second-generation TPU, called the “Cloud TPU.” The new chip could now be used not just for inference (running trained machine learning neural network models) but also for training.

Now, developers can access either a full 1,000-TPU pod or “slices” of this pod. Previously, Cloud TPU pods supported 256 Cloud TPUs, but it seems Google has now created a toroidal mesh network across multiple racks, so that a TPU pod can contain more than 1,000 TPUs. Developers can access slices of the pod as small as 16-cores (two TPUs) if they are on a budget.

Google showed at its I/O event that a 256 Cloud TPU v2 slice can train a standard ResNet-50 image classification model using the ImageNet data in 11.3 minutes, while a 256 Cloud TPU v3 slice can train it in 7.1 minutes. According to these numbers, the Cloud TPU v2 is 60% slower than the Cloud TPU v2. Using a single TPU, the same model would be trained in 302 minutes.

Information for accessing the public beta is available on Google's blog post. 

Google Cloud TPU's Evolution

When it debuted, Google said then its 2nd-generation TPU could achieve 180 teraflops (TFLOPS) of floating-point performance, or six times more than Nvidia’s latest Tesla V100 accelerator for FP16 half-precision computation. The Cloud TPU also had a 50% advantage over Nvidia’s Tensor Core performance. Google designed its Cloud TPU pods with 64 TPUs each, for a total peak performance of 11.5 petaFLOPS.

A year later, in 2018, the company announced version 3 of its TPU with a performance rated at 420 TFLOPS. The company also announced a new liquid-cooled pod configuration with eight times the performance of the previous one, featuring 256 TPUs and 100 petaFLOPS performance.

Even though Google doesn’t sell the Cloud TPUs directly (it only sells an inference-optimized version called Edge TPU), by giving developers access to them in the cloud, the company is still competing with companies such as Nvidia or Intel that would like developers to buy their machine learning hardware instead. The TPUs tend to have better performance/dollar compared to the alternatives, which should put pressure on machine learning chipmakers to offer higher value. 

Google Cloud TPU Use Cases

Google has clarified that not all types of machine learning applications are suited for the Cloud TPU. According to Google, the ones that make the most sense include:

• Models dominated by matrix computations
• Models with no custom TensorFlowo perating inside the main training loop
• Models that rain for weeks or months
• Larger and very large models with very large effective batch sizes

Additionally, Google has recommended against using TPUs for applications such as Linear algebra programs that require frequent branching and workloads that access memory in a sparse manner or require high-precision arithmetic.

Australian cybersecurity start-up UpGuard revealed on Wednesday that information about 540 million Facebook users gathered by the Cultura Colectiva media company was publicly accessible via an unprotected Amazon S3 bucket.

The public records were said to include account names, user IDs, comments, reactions and other information. UpGuard said it emailed Cultura Colectiva about the issue on January 10 and 14. When it didn’t receive a response, it emailed Amazon Web Services (AWS) on January 28 and then again on February 21, as the data remained accessible.

The security firm said the data stored by Cultura Colectiva remained available until Bloomberg contacted Facebook for comment on April 3. Then, after months of inaction from both Cultura Colectiva and AWS, information about more than half a billion people was finally taken down. It’s not clear why AWS didn’t remove it sooner.

According to the BBC, Facebook (the company) said that Cultura Colectiva’s decision to store information about its Facebook (the social network) users outside of official Facebook (the platform) servers violated its terms of service. That allowed the company to facilitate the records being taken down from AWS.

This might seem like a victory for Facebook: it was made aware of a company exposing user data and acted swiftly to protect its users. But, just like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this shows that Facebook struggles to enforce its policies. Cultura Colectiva’s records were exposed for several months after UpGuard's disclouse and who knows how long before that.

Facebook’s platform offers access to more data than most people can fathom. The company is obligated to make sure other companies gather, use and store that data responsibly. Both here and with the Cambridge Analytica scandal Facebook didn’t—and perhaps couldn’t—do that until the issues attracted public scrutiny. (To say nothing of the company’s own mismanagement of user data.)

The revelation was part of a larger UpGuard report about how companies often fail to secure information stored with AWS. The security firm discovered another company, At The Pool, exposed data about 22 million of its users via the service as well. And the list doesn’t stop there.

WhatsApp recently announced that users will soon be able to backup all of their data to Google Drive without that storage eating into their allocated Drive storage. What the company ommitted to say at the time was that the data backed-up to Drive will be stored in plaintext, without any encryption.

Google Drive Backups Not Encrypted

Starting November 12, WhatsApp backups to Google Drive will not be counted towards users’ storage quota. This is the result of a deal made between Google and Facebook, which owns WhatsApp. Google already analyzes its users' Drive accounts for targeted advertising purposes, so it was to be expected that if Google is going to store WhatsApp’s data for free, the company is going to get something in return (such as access to WhatsApp users’ data).

WhatsApp confirmed in its FAQ that the data that is backed up to Google Drive will not benefit from the same default end-to-end encryption implemented for real-time conversations, with the following line: “Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive.”

How WhatsApp Could Have Encrypted The Data

When a communications service is end-to-end encrypted, the users are in full control because they own the private key that is used to encrypt the communications. This key normally stored locally on the device in a secure environment such as a hardware security module. However, if the users want to change their devices and then access that data, they’d first need to transfer their private key, too. The vast majority of users don’t know how to do that or don't want to do it.

Data stored in the cloud isn’t normally encrypted with the user’s private key for the same reason. It's easier to transfer and access unencrypted data. This may also be part of the reason why WhatsApp disabled end-to-end encryption for backed-up data.

However, WhatsApp had another option here it could have easily implemented, which is allowing the user to encrypt the data with a password, just like you would normally encrypt a .zip file. The password could be required only during the setup of the Drive backup, and then it could be stored safely on the device, the same way private keys are stored, so that new messages are backed up automatically. In this case, neither Google, nor anyone else breaking into your Google Drive account would have access to that data.

On the other hand, if WhatsApp had done that, Google would have had little reason to negotiate this deal with the company. We suspect WhatsApp not encrypting the backups was likely not a technical issue primarily, but a business one.

Moving on From End-to-End Encryption

WhatsApp’s last remaining co-founder, Jan Koum, quit earlier this year after allegedly clashing with Facebook leadership, which apparently wanted to cripple the app’s encryption in order to implement more business-friendly tools into the app.

With both co-founders and many of the original employees quitting WhatsApp, Facebook may start looking to recuperate its $22 billion investment. End-to-end encryption could be in the way of doing that, as it doesn’t allow Facebook to look into users’ private messages or for the company to interpose itself in between users’ conversations. Time will tell how far Facebook will be willing to go with its plans.

Today, the team behind Google Drive announced that you can now open files from within your Google Drive account with your own desktop applications. Although once you download apps to your desktop, your default programs for those files should already recognize them -- all you have to do is click on them to open in that program -- but Google seems unhappy with this process and wants to make it a little quicker.

Google previously allowed users to open Drive files with web applications, but it's now releasing a new Chrome extension that lets you open Drive files in desktop applications for advanced image and video editing software, accounting and tax programs, or 3D animation and design tools. Now you shouldn't be limited to Web apps that may offer lesser capabilities as a more advanced desktop application, such as Adobe's Photoshop or Autodesk's AutoCAD.

To make this work, first you need to install the Drive app for Windows or Mac OS and sync your files. After that is finished, go to the Drive web app in Chrome, right-click on the file you need opened, click "Open With" to see a list of compatible applications available from your PC, and then choose the one you want.

After you open your files and edit them, you can save the changes back to Google Drive, and the file will be synced with all of your devices and collaborators.

Apparently, the extension isn't available to everyone just yet, but it should be rolling out to everyone over the next few days.

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Comparison Guide To Cloud Storage Providers

Over the past 20 years, ubiquitous document access has become increasingly critical as digital portfolios have grown to span family, financial, work and school activities. At the same time, concerns about maintaining data safety and security have also escalated. Early services like FTP and peer-to-peer sharing remain popular, but predominantly with more technical users.

Today’s cloud storage provides simple file sharing, but also extends personal workstation file space, integrates document editing, includes real-time backup and document workflow. These services are cheap, fast, easy to use and require very little up front or long-term end user investment. The most time-consuming tasks, notably large backup and restore, can be automated or occur behind the scenes. 

Editor’s Note: Use the questionnaire below to have our sister site, BuyerZone, provide you with information from a variety of vendors for free:

The leaders include pure-play vendors Box, Dropbox and Google, and the two-walled garden approaches from Apple and Microsoft. The latter fall into this category because they offer cloud storage as a byproduct of a more robust offering – Apple began with a device backup service, and Microsoft uses OneDrive as the foundation to Office 365.  While Google Drive evolved from Google Docs (and still provides rich document editing), it can be more easily evaluated on its pure storage merits.

Among the offerings there is parity in features, functionality, security and price, but we aim to show where they differ.

What am I getting out of it?

From a practical storage perspective, these services offer a token amount of free space, with upgrades ranging up to paid plans for unlimited storage. For services promoting unlimited storage, limitations occur around file sizes. For example, Box Enterprise caps files at 5GB, whereas Google Drive has a very generous 1TB maximum. Note that “free” is a relative term – to open a free iCloud account, users must have an Apple iOS or Mac OS device.

Google’s top tier of $3600/year for 30TB of anywhere storage is not a lot of money. Personal plans ranging from $100-300/year are extremely reasonable for people interested in backing up computers; sharing files with colleagues, family members and classmates; and using cloud storage to support a small business.

The open (pure-play) cloud storage services allow storing any type, style, and kind of file. All services use Web browser interfaces by default (to create, upload and view files), and all have varying degrees of viewers. Google allows users to preview over 20 file types, Box has a high-fidelity mobile engine and Microsoft allows users to open Office files in their native format without a subscription. These are not replacements for fit-for-purpose presentation tools or AutoCAD, but they suffice for most situations.

Browser drag-and-drop upload is handled so well that it is now an expected feature, and is surprising when not supported. Even Microsoft provides drag-and-drop and right-click support across browsers and platforms, although the real-time feedback lags others (see Dropbox real-time identification).

Desktop synchronization is a powerful feature for users backing up or extending their computers to the Cloud. In this area, Dropbox shines. Other services lag behind either due to business decisions (Box prefers people use the browser to keep real-time file control with administrators), background service system resource spikes or technical gaps.

More than a feature comparison, we looked at the services as three use cases. The first is personal storage, or extending one’s own file system to the cloud. The second is sharing, especially of moderately size to large documents. Sharing was looked at in both a one-to-one and group sharing, with people who had accounts on the service and those who did not.

Finally, the third use case was extensibility, API and SDK. For this, we explored services’ abilities to be a platform or infrastructure backbone to support a small business or gaming-in-the-cloud.

Oh, a note about performance testing. We recognize that readers would be interested in performance, so why didn't we test speed? In our findings, performance varied wildly based on a number of factors related to physical connection and service architecture. First, our primary testing facility was serviced by high-speed cable. As is the case with many cable Internet packages, ours had a 'boost' function which artificially inflates initial download performance, then slows remaining downloads. Second, services vary based on their sync mechanism. Dropbox (and backup service Mozy) perform block- or bit-level replication. This means that once files are initially sent to the Cloud, additional saves only synchronize what actually has changed. This is most apparent on modern-era Office documents, which utilize a standards-based XML data structure. Finally, Dropbox also employs LAN sync, which allows computers running on a physical LAN to sync files locally, rather than downloading updates from the Cloud. Two caveats: updates are still sent to the Cloud, and when installing Dropbox on a new computer (or if the index becomes corrupted), all files must be re-synchronized from the Cloud.

Box Cloud Storage - Pricing And Features Overview

Box is all business. The service has gained tremendous momentum over the past year, and is now at an estimated 25 million individual customers and 225,000 enterprise ones.

The Box browser user interface is well-organized, streamlined, intuitive and feature-rich, offering a wide variety of built-in and third-party capabilities. Box behaves like a full application running in a Web browser, including drag-and-drop uploads, right-clicks and top menus. The user interface feels more like a competitor to enterprise tools like Documentum, OpenText LiveLink, IBM FileNet P8 and Microsoft SharePoint than a direct peer to the other services we tested. However, it is a cloud service at its core, and Box offers its sleek functionality and powerful document review (workflow) and collaboration tools to all users.

While administrative controls, unlimited storage and capabilities like Salesforce.com CRM integration are reserved for paying customers, the power and flexibility of Box means that individuals can quickly open a personal account and purchase additional storage.

Box has the most powerful full-text search of all the services, and returns the best results. For instance, while Dropbox returned one result for a sample query that included unique terms split between file name and full-text search, Box returned 58 spot-on results. The instant-results drop-down is handy, and the full-text index rivals enterprise solutions.

On Box’s mobile apps, all file names are easy to see with its thin font, as compared to the other services, which often truncate file names. File sorting can be done in three ways (name, date or size) and the thin iOS 7-matching font allows for more file details than other services.

Both the full browser preview and mobile app viewers are feature-rich, with the most accurate file renditions, including high-quality fonts and correct PowerPoint slide forms. But this comes with a cost – we found that file sizes were large, and previews consumed far more bandwidth than other services. Since users cannot choose between a low- or high-quality image, quick-viewing PDFs is much quicker using other services, even over Wi-Fi. Box errs on the side of quality, which can cost time and money over mobile connections. To its credit, Box warns you when you attempt to preview files on mobile networks.

Collaboration and Synchronization

At its core, Box is a document collaboration service, and performs an excellent job at this task. Everything reasonable and intuitive is here, including the file lock status, colored “flags” on files indicating version numbers, metadata tags, access statistics and workflow task management.

Box is first a Web app and secondarily a synchronization-to-the-desktop service. For people looking to extend their file systems to the Cloud, Box folder synchronization can be set at the top level (like most other services) and – somewhat unique in online services – at each sub-folder. Synchronizing individual folders to a PC is controlled via the Web application, but cannot be tweaked by the operating system (OS) extension.

Sending links to shared folders is also straightforward, and can be accomplished through the browser, mobile app and aforementioned OS extension. There is a lot of power to sharing in Box: links can be open access or only apply to pre-determined collaborators, shared files can be restricted to view-only (not download) and they can be set to automatically expire. These three thoughtful settings are additional mechanisms for the security-conscious or absent-minded.

We noticed a small bug in testing – if you accidentally click on “share” in  the browser UI, it immediately sets a link (indicated by the chain link icon) before you actually complete the full action/decision by clicking OK. “Un-sharing” doesn’t take much time, but this can be a security issue for those who don’t realize it.

Integrations

Box has a very comprehensive API integration program, with more than 1000 integrations through more than 550 partners, including CRM, office applications, social collaboration, security and product/project management applications. However, it is important to note that access to the enterprise integrations requires the highest tier of Box pricing, Box Enterprise (or the custom-priced Box Elite). Box Business and Box Enterprise customers also get Active Directory and SSO integration to align with corporate accounts and policies. With a focus on enterprise application integration, Box APIs are designed to make the service a platform for large systems and less of a “developer playground” for small developers.

Two of the more interesting integrations are with Microsoft Office and Google Apps. These illustrate Box’s commitment to being a cloud storage provider and not an application vendor. It clearly separates them from those who try to do both.

Finally, Box has a Content API that exposes all of its key functions to organizations looking to build their own content management platform.

Pricing is slightly different from the other cloud storage vendors. Since Box is designed for the enterprise, caps are set based on individual file size rather than overall storage volume. This is reasonable since bandwidth and practicality dictate a natural glass ceiling. In the past, Box offered lifetime 50GB storage promotions, so there are a number of well-endowed personal accounts in the market. Box truly realizes the promise set forth by cloud storage and sharing.

Box Pricing

Dropbox Cloud Storage - Pricing And Features Overview

[Editor's Note: After we finished testing and this article was being finalized, Dropbox announced some changes to the service, especially around pricing, but also with new functionality. We detail some of those changes under the subheading "Update" at the end of this page.]

Dropbox was initially a “magic folder” targeted at consumers, but it is now embraced by more than 300 million users, including universities, healthcare systems and other corporations. Dropbox was a pioneer in extending local PC content to the cloud for file sharing. While it is expensive – especially compared to Google’s 2014 pricing – its bit-level replication, ability to recover deleted files and unlimited version control through Packrat make for an award-winning tool.

Memory footprint is also something Dropbox users should be aware of. In our testing on a mix of machines with 8-16GB of RAM, the Dropbox client consumed between 70 and 160MB (the second-largest behind Windows SVCHOST).

Once installed, adding files through the browser interface is as easy as dragging and dropping them. Creating folders is also very easy, as is sharing those folders with others. We found that full sharing can only be controlled at root-level directories. This makes for an often top-weighted directory structure.

Two unique benefits of Dropbox: the service is intelligent enough to identify when multiple Dropbox-synced computers are on a local network, and the ability to re-build the Dropbox file index based on files that are already located on the local disk. The former feature allows for fast localized sync of files without having to go to the Dropbox cloud. The second feature comes into play if you install Dropbox on a brand new PC. You can copy your entire Dropbox directory structure – and files – and Dropbox will automatically re-build the index without having to re-download files from the cloud. These two features save bandwidth and time, while recognizing all of the file and folder security and sharing controls previously set.

Because it is a consumer-oriented service at its core, Dropbox makes purchase, setup, download and initial file sync very easy. For casual users, the Web interface is simple yet feature-rich, and has some unique capabilities unavailable in other interfaces, like browsing file creation, deletion and update events. While Dropbox lacks true workflow, I used event viewing to see changes by other users in shared folders and as a means to perform multi-user version control.

Syncing files

Backing up, sharing and syncing files are the core uses of cloud storage service, and Dropbox does this well. All clients work consistently, and syncs are generally quick. Starting up Windows and Mac clients (upon resume-from-sleep or initial boot) can take between 15 seconds and five minutes, presumably while the client is loading the cache and comparing the file list with the cloud. Initial start-up and sync time has become slower over the past two years. With desktop client version 2.8.2, it was not unusual to see the first sync 5-10 minutes into a Windows session.

Dropbox has a unique feature called "selective sync," which let each of our environments inherit a different persona. The feature allows users to turn on or off top-level directories on a per-machine basis, which minimizes the storage footprint and file clutter across PCs. For those using Dropbox on multiple computers running on a network (small business or family household), Dropbox provides the option to sync locally instead of going back to the cloud. If the same file is saved by multiple PCs or users, Dropbox will append the computer name and “Conflicted Copy” to the file, rather than reconciling changes (Microsoft OneDrive does a much better job of multi-user editing).

What shouldn’t be missed is Dropbox’s incremental (block- or bit-level) replication. Instead of synchronizing entire files, Dropbox only needs to update the pieces of the files that are actually changed, greatly minimizing bandwidth and sync times. This is a very high-end document management feature now available to the masses. It also conserves bandwidth.

Version control is supplemented by Packrat, which is Dropbox’s name for maintaining revision history over an unlimited time horizon (30-day file history is standard). This feature has saved us a couple of times, but you can only review versions via a Web browser. Dropbox, in response to customer feedback, has updated Packrat’s Restore function to work like enterprise document management systems (the restored version becomes the newest iteration). This is very powerful. However, moving directories eliminates all version history of files within the folders. Moving folders back to the original location shows the version history including when files were “deleted” and “added.” Version history needs some work to become folder independent.

Dropbox ‘Ecosystem’

Any good software platform has a rich set of third-party participants, and Dropbox is no exception. Dropbox has two major categories of extensions: drop-ins and three categories of Dropbox APIs.

Drop-ins are a simple way to add the two most common Dropbox functions to existing apps via prebuilt code: Chooser (or "Choose From") and Saver ("Save To").  While simple in nature, it is powerful in execution, because apps that use lots of structured content (but would value from unstructured documents and images) can leverage the Dropbox infrastructure with very little coding and QA.

In the formal API category, Dropbox has long promoted its platform to developers, who can add the ability view, create or edit rich documents. One of my favorite examples is the Microsoft Office editor CloudOn. Since editing remotely-stored files requires strong security, the newer value-added API includes security/encryption software. There are also integration modules for multi-platform mobile apps and Dropbox storage for pure structured data. The final API type is designed for smaller developers who wish to save "game state" and those who value conflict resolution through advanced data and file locking rules.

With greater corporate interest comes the need for additional hooks into the service and a management console. The API set is rich, but lags Box on real-world adoption and internal promotion (Box has right-click send-to Docusign and Chatter out of the box, for example). Dropbox is currently promoting “over 300,000 apps on the Dropbox platform,” but it is difficult to discern what exactly an app is and the level of integration.

Security

Dropbox doesn’t have built-in encryption, but is quick to refer users and organizations to various options supported through the Dropbox developer network.

One note for security-conscious users: those who synchronize files with their PCs are inherently able to take content with them, and since Dropbox uses PC/Mac sync as a core selling point, you should be aware that in our testing we found that “unsharing” folders still left files in our Dropbox cache directory, or allowed us to recover deleted files that weren’t really permanently deleted. The solution is simple: don’t install the desktop client. But of course that removes a key benefit.

One additional security worry surfaced in recent months – hackers are spreading malware through public Dropbox links (dl.dropbox.com). This is a security hole Dropbox needs to fix quickly.

Summer 2014 Updates

Dropbox made some recent changes to the service to reflect customer requirements and to gain parity in a few key areas. The most obvious change is the "Pro" tier, which includes 1TB of storage for the same price as the previous 100GB tier of storage. However, there is a lot more to the Pro service, particularly around security. Dropbox now has Remote Wipe, a feature that will let you remove Dropbox files on a device that is lost or stolen. We did not have an opportunity to test this, but previously found that files removed from unshared folders lingered on PCs in the .dropbox.cache folder.

Second, Dropbox allows the expiration of shared links and specific view/edit permissions on shared folders. This feature already exists in other services like Box, so Dropbox is playing catch-up. Finally, Pro comes with extended version history of up to one year, replacing the need for Packrat for many users. Dropbox is not offering Packrat to new users, and is actively promoting the change in version history policy as of November 1, 2014.

Dropbox Pricing

Google Drive Cloud Storage - Pricing And Features Overview

Google’s Drive service is an extremely affordable cloud storage option, yet very powerful for collaboration and teamwork. The features around team review and collaboration have been enhanced and polished through increased file change notifications, "live" in-document highlights, and integration with Google Hangouts online meeting tool. Google really thought through the functionality that both consumers and business users need.

In its most simple form, Google allows users to make comments and share files as viewers, collaborators or co-owners. This is simple and fast, yet powerful. While other tools can also do this, Google does the collaboration better through its tight integration between storage and editing tools, and its focus on platform-independent browser-based apps. The apps and ecosystem also work on Chromium zero- or minimal-storage devices.

For word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents, Google's full-featured and feature-rich Docs, Sheets, Forms and Drawing tools edge close to a "walled garden" approach. However, the document editing isn't required, nor is it forced on users as part of the value proposition.

File changes and updates are outlined when viewing files, including color highlights by user. The activity tab in the browser window shows all file changes and viewing activity within a folder, and lets you see detailed changes when individual files are selected. Unfortunately, we could not see detailed activity on older documents; many documents not edited prior to January 2014 did not have any logged activity in our Drive. 

As we tested Google Drive, the lines between the consumer-oriented Drive and Google Enterprise Apps appeared to be thinning. The late June 2014 announcement of Google Drive for Business further validated this. For $10 per month, Google offers auditing, reporting, retention rules and control over desktop client installation. The company  also addressed questions around security, specifically documents at rest and in transit, through security controlled via the enterprise administration console and mobile device management.

Google differentiates Drive around cross-platform usability. The iOS and Android apps are very polished, and have improved greatly over the past year. For example, fonts are slim and easy to read, and folders are now displayed on top of the file list, both of which make browsing Drive a much more logical task than with Dropbox, which mixes folders and files together in a list. However, Google removed the built-in editing capability from its Drive mobile app in early 2014, so users must now separately install Google apps to have native editing functionality on the go. 

Another interesting feature of Google Drive is its ability to convert Office documents to the native Google format within the Drive Web interface, and pull text from PDF documents and image files. The latter functionality acts as “lightweight OCR” and can save users time if they need the raw text out of otherwise read-only destination formats. This is optional, and can be controlled for corporate purposes through the admin console or via PDF creation rules (previously Google Docs allowed opening password-enabled PDF documents, but this was fixed).

The only perplexing piece of Google Drive is, surprisingly, its search functionality, especially compared to Box. First, the search results are sparse, the quick-results aren't instantaneous, and to engage a full-text search query, you have to take extra steps and go to the full list of results. Second, with search as Google’s core competence, the results screen pales in comparison to what we are accustomed from other Google products (for example, there aren’t highlights or explanations of where, within files, the full-text terms are found). 

Google has an incredibly powerful and open Drive SDK, including deep integration with Android app back-ends, and birthing many Drive-centric products like Teamlab Office (an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office). The Google API allows developers to write Drive applications in Java, Python, Javascript, .NET, Ruby, Go and Node.js. Getting started is as easy as setting up an account in Google’s Developer Console and attaching to a Drive-enabled Google account.

The Drive ecosystem and Google's open ethos has resulted in Chrome apps for Microsoft Office, Box and other products and services that arguably compete with Google on various products.

Google Drive Pricing

Apple iCloud Storage - Pricing And Features Overview

Apple's iCloud was originally developed as a backup mechanism for Apple devices and associated apps. It has come a long way in the past three years, but still shows the legacy of its core purpose.

For Apple computer and device users, iCloud is a no-brainer. It is seamless across all Apple devices, and the Windows client/plug-in extends contacts, calendar, tasks, bookmarks and photos to a vast majority of PC users. With Apple's new (2014) pricing model, iCloud is both attractive to end users and developers, the latter of whom get a nearly bottomless glass of storage - via CloudKit - for file assets, app development sandbox space and database storage.

The initial use of iCloud stands true today: it is an excellent backup system for iOS devices. The scheduled backup mechanism can help those who lose or damage an iOS device get back to their most recent state in a matter of minutes (only risking the loss of photos and videos).

Integration with MacOS has become tighter over the past few years. The Mac control panel is pre-installed on updated versions of Mountain Lion (10.8), and is fully integrated with Mavericks (10.9). Apple's Mail, Address Book and Calendar apps quickly download and sync data from iCloud, and mirror what is found on iOS devices and the iCloud Web interface.

Apple also makes a Windows iCloud control panel available for download. While iCloud integrates contacts, calendar and tasks with Microsoft Outlook, and bookmarks with Internet Explorer, the majority of Windows users install the control panel to view and sync photos taken by iOS devices. In my testing, I was a little frustrated with slow photo browsing and Windows Explorer crashes, demonstrating that Windows desktop integration is a work in progress.

While Apple is more expensive for traditional non-developer consumers than the pure-player Cloud storage vendors, Apple also provides the iWork applications – and excellent templates – for owners of devices that ship with iOS 7 (a $99 value).

The Web-based versions are still in "beta" according to Apple, but do not appear to be works-in-progress. The Web interfaces are clean, fast and easy to use, without being too cartoonish. Editing documents on iPhones and iPads has been improved dramatically in the past year. Document synchronization across Apple iDevices is seamless and fast.

The most challenging issue with iCloud is that it’s difficult to get documents out of the system. Since iCloud is designed as a walled garden for Apple content, sharing documents or collaborating with others – key features embraced by other services – require extra steps or just aren’t available. For example, link sharing requires collaborators to have an iCloud account. Downloaded presentations - even those in Microsoft PowerPoint format - have issues with fonts, objects and other formatting. This is not a “pure” cloud drive.

Based on the investment Apple is making, take a cautious look at iCloud if you have an Apple device foundation, but also want platform-independent, browser-based access to documents along with polished templates. The two greatest issues – high cost of plans and slow photo browsing – should improve. The “free” iWork applications are a boon to casual office users, as they are available across platforms and through a browser interface.

Apple iCloud Pricing

Microsoft OneDrive Cloud Storage - Pricing And Features

Microsoft rebranded SkyDrive as OneDrive earlier this year, and continues as a service primarily centered around Microsoft Office documents. While any file can be stored and shared in OneDrive, the greatest benefit is gained when saving, viewing and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

The core file storage component has improved because you get a larger amount of storage at a much lower cost, making OneDrive competitive with the pure-play providers. As of the summer of 2014, Microsoft increased the quota for paying Office 365 users to 1TB each for up to five users. The free service increased from 7GB to 15GB.

The ultimate value proposition of OneDrive revolves around tight Microsoft Office file and application integration. While the first product to utilize OneDrive for its cloud back-end was OneNote (a cross-platform note-taking tool), the service provides storage for all Office and non-Office files, with varying levels of integration and viewing capabilities.

You can view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files within a browser or download them for local editing, including directly within Microsoft Office 2013 applications. This is similar to the way SharePoint, running on corporate networks, allows cloud-based open and save, embedded right within Office 2010 and Office 2013.

However, there are some caveats. The first is that in order to provide a seamless experience, usernames have to “sync” between the host computer and the OneDrive service. This is easy on Windows 8 and Office 2013, which have direct OneDrive logins, but less so on earlier platforms, notably Windows 7 and Office 2010, which lack the direct sign-in hooks. In my testing, opening a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document for editing on a local instance of Office 2010 resulted in the system thinking that I was a different user from the OneDrive user I was signed in as.

For those wishing to strictly use Office in a browser, simple file viewing also has its limitations; we could only view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Support for Visio and Project documents is missing, resulting in an awkward “iTunes-like” permissions dialog box asking if the file opened properly or, if not, whether I wanted to purchase the tool.

Microsoft does provide a local computer sync app, just like the other file sharing services do, and it is conceptually very similar to the “Save to SharePoint site” feature in Office (2010+). For many users, this is an attractive means to save and retrieve documents, but from our experience with the earlier SharePoint integration, we found that it was difficult to remove old sites and/or strip the network save out completely. As noted above, Windows 8 and Office 2013 are superior in this regard, as they are directly tied into OneDrive accounts at the core, removing the need to download a separate sync app.

On the Mac OS X side, the Office programs are a generation behind, lacking the integration with OneDrive found on Windows. The only Mac Office application to use the new Office foundation platform is OneNote, which has been integrated with OneDrive (SkyDrive) for some time. Also as of this writing, Microsoft has not officially announced a date for the next version of Office Mac that aligns OneDrive sign-in with Office 2013 and Office 365 sign in.

While Microsoft provides a suite of applications and a large amount of storage, our primary beef with OneDrive is that it is not a differentiated service beyond the Office apps, and getting content into and out of the system is cumbersome compared to the cloud storage alternatives. While Windows 8.x integration is good, this addresses a small portion of the OS market (between 11% and 13% of OS shipments, according to The Next Web May 2014 research).

The greatest value in OneDrive comes from the premium service, including the most current version of Microsoft Office with automated Cloud-based backup. We just wish Microsoft took the next step to include Project and Visio to differentiate itself from the other players.

Microsoft OneDrive Pricing

On Wednesday, Chris Jones, corporate vice president of Windows services, announced the "re-launch" of Microsoft's cloud storage service, OneDrive.

As previously reported, the name was changed from SkyDrive due to Microsoft losing a trademark case against British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) back in July 2013. BSkyB, which had its own cloud offering Sky Store & Share but shut it down in 2011, was afraid consumers would be confused by Microsoft's cloud storage. The courts agreed.

Microsoft settled with BSkyB for an undisclosed amount. BSkyB in turn allowed Microsoft to continue to use the SkyDrive name until it found a suitable alternative. The new name, OneDrive, now reflects Microsoft's vision of one platform, one service and one interface. The new name just makes more sense than the previous label.

"When we announced the new name OneDrive, we noted how it is much more aligned with our vision for the future," Jones writes. "Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to get all of your favorite stuff in one place—one place that is accessible via all of the devices you use every day, at home and at work."

For new customers, Microsoft is offering a default 7 GB of storage space. Customers who refer ten friends can receive up to 5 GB of extra storage (500 MB per friend who signs on). Microsoft will even tack on another 3 GB of space if customers use OneDrive to back up the photos stored on their device.

Wait, there's more! Customers needing more than 15 GB of space can add 50 GB for $25 per year, 100 GB for $50 per year and 200 GB for $100 per year.

"To celebrate the official launch of OneDrive, today we will also give 100,000 people 100 GB of free storage for 1 year. That's 10 PB of free storage—enough storage space for a photo of everyone on the planet. If you want to be one of those 100,000, keep an eye on @OneDrive for clues," Jones writes.

Jones states that OneDrive is excellent for sharing documents, as users can work on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents using the free online version of Office in OneDrive. The service is also great for storing, viewing and sharing photos and videos, such as posting videos directly to Facebook or sending an email with an attached picture with just one click.

"The deep integration with so many of the products you already use means you never have to worry about manually saving your photos and videos," Jones writes.

To get started with OneDrive, head here.

Last summer, Microsoft was ordered to change the name of its SkyDrive cloud storage service due to a legal dispute with BSkyB. The company wasn't given a deadline (or if it was, it wasn't publicized) and was permitted to continue using the SkyDrive name until it could find and transition to an alternative. Microsoft today revealed that alternative to be OneDrive. This morning, Preview.OneDrive.com went live with the following teaser:

"Get ready for an even better place to store and share your favorite things across all your favorite devices. OneDrive is everything you love about SkyDrive and more. And it's coming soon."

There was also a form to sign up for updates as well as a link to the OneDrive blog. Over there, Microsoft's SkyDrive blog has been rebranded to match the new name and Ryan Gavin has published the first official 'OneDrive' blog post. Explaining the change of name, Gavin writes:

"We know that increasingly you will have many devices in your life, but you really want only one place for your most important stuff," Gavin says. "One place for all of your photos and videos. One place for all of your documents. One place that is seamlessly connected across all the devices you use. You want OneDrive for everything in your life."

Gavin doesn't specifically mention the reason for the name change except to say that it wasn't an easy decision and dropped a quick link to a relevant news story on the issue, but Microsoft was actually brought to court over the OneDrive name last summer. UK satellite company BSkyB (commonly known as Sky) won a trademark infringement suit against Microsoft in July of 2013. Sky claimed that Microsoft's use of 'Sky Drive' in all forms relating to cloud storage services amounted to an infringement of BSkyB's trademarks because BSkyB used to have its own cloud storage service dubbed 'Sky Store & Share.' The service allowed users to upload documents, files and photos for storage or sharing with others and was wound down in 2011. Still, Sky was worried people would be confused by Microsoft's SkyDrive offering and the courts agreed. The case was related to use of the term 'SkyDrive' in the European Union, but Microsoft, understandably, wants one name for the service, not two, so OneDrive it is.

Though the rumor mill had spat out BingDrive, FetchDrive, and NewDrive as potential contenders, OneDrive definitely makes the most sense. Especially when you consider Microsoft's Xbox One, which Microsoft bills as one device for all your entertainment needs.

Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Last week, Seagate emailed users to inform them that its Seagate Dashboard cloud storage service would be going through some updates that would render the upload capability of the service unavailable for "a few days" (over a fortnight). While the updates are processing and testing, scheduled backups have been suspended (or may result in errors) from through to October 18. However, Seagate's email to customers didn't really go into why it suddenly needed to shut down upload capability for more than two weeks. We got in touch with Seagate for some more details.

First of all, Seagate assures us that customers' data is perfectly safe. Though the company did urge people to make a back up of their data, the company describes this measure as merely a precaution.

"There is no risk to our customers' data, in fact, they will still have the ability to download their data during the maintenance period," Seagate told us in an emailed statement. "Seagate recommended that users create a copy of the content stored in the cloud merely as a precautionary measure. Seagate always advocates that users should keep multiple backup copies of  data in separate locations."

So what happened? We were right in assuming this was not a planned update, and that Seagate ran into an issue that necessitated an interruption to service. Specifically, Seagate found out on September 18 that the back-end storage service provider for its software vendor, Nero, was shutting down. Nero needed to find a new back-end service provider and migrate the data. The ongoing suspension of user data upload is a result of that migration to the new provider. Seagate says customers were informed on October 2, immediately after Seagate and Nero were able to finalize a seamless migration solution.

"This was not a planned maintenance. The notification of the need to migrate was on extremely short notice. Seagate acted quickly to protect our customers’ data by extending the deadline with our vendor, Nero, and by identifying the smoothest possible migration path." Seagate said in its email to Tom's Hardware.

Seagate Cloud Storage Service customers can expect normal operation to resume on October 18.

Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

Earlier this month, UK satellite company BSkyB (commonly known as Sky) won a trademark infringement suit against Microsoft. The suit related to Redmond's use of the term 'SkyDrive' in the European Union. Sky claimed that Microsoft's use of 'Sky Drive' in all forms relating to cloud storage services amounted to an infringement of BSkyB's trademarks because BSkyB used to have its own cloud storage service dubbed 'Sky Store & Share.' The service allowed users to upload documents, files and photos for storage or sharing with others and was wound down in 2011. Still, Sky was worried people would be confused by Microsoft's SkyDrive offering and the courts agreed. At the time, Microsoft said it planned to appeal the ruling, though it seems the company will have to change the SkyDrive name after all.

The Verge reports that in a settlement issued on Wednesday, BSkyB notes that Microsoft will not appeal the court ruling. Not only that, but Microsoft will have to find a new name for 'SkyDrive.' BSkyB has given Microsoft permission to continue using the 'SkyDrive' brand until it can find and transition to a new name but financial terms of the agreement were not made public.

• How Secure is Google Drive?
• How to Secure Your Cloud Storage
• Tips for Living Without the Optical Drive

Storing your data in the cloud means you don't have to deal with physical solutions that take up space in your home. However, cloud storage isn't free, and the more data you have, the more it's going to cost you to keep it in the cloud. Bitcasa is hoping to make cloud storage a little more accessible to those with lots of data with its Bitcasa Infinite Drive.

Launched in the United States last December, Bitcasa offers unlimited cloud storage for a monthly (or yearly) fee. The company is now bringing its service to the United Kingdom and Europe priced at £7/€8 per month or £55/€60 per year. These prices will go up by 20 percent come August 31st of this year, so be sure to sign up before then if you're interested.

"Instead of having a hard drive, imagine if you could install software that acts as a virtual hard drive but literally never runs out of space, and you can instantly access and share that content on any device you own. This is Bitcasa," explained Tony Gauda, CEO and co-founder, Bitcasa. 

Bitcasa also announced a new mobile design along with performance updates and support for 10 new languages ( English-UK, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (traditional), Chinese (simplified), Japanese and Korean). The service is currently available on iOS, Android, Mac desktop, Windows Desktop, Windows RT and the Web.

Though storage has never been cheaper, there are certain benefits to storing you files in the cloud. If there weren't, services like Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, and DropBox wouldn't still be running. This month, a new player is strutting onto the playing field. UK ISP British Telecom is gearing up to launch a brand new cloud storage service.

Gizmodo UK writes that the service will be linked to BT's broadband offerings and each customer's cloud storage capacity will vary depending on the internet package they're on. BT Cloud will feature two different tiers, one that offers 2 GB of storage and one that offers 50 GB. According to Pocket-Lint, BT is covering itself with a disclaimer saying it doesn't support activities that infringe upon copyrights. That said, the company is happy to point out how many songs or movies you could store using the service.

To get your free BT Cloud storage, you'll need to download the app (available for both iOS and Android) and activate you account using the directions on screen (data connection required). From there, you can choose to automatically back-up content from your smartphone or tablet (over WiFi or 3G). After you've done that, you can install the BT Cloud app on your desktop by visiting bt.com/myextras. This same URL will allow you to view your usage and change your storage allowance.

The Android app can be found in the Google Play Store, while the iOS app is, of course, hanging out in the App Store.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that cloud storage service Dropbox is nothing more than a "little startup".

SkyDrive, the software giant's own cloud storage service, has more than 200 million users as of October, 2012, as revealed by former Windows president Steven Sinofsky (who is, incidentally, said to have been fired by Ballmer himself). Dropbox reached the 100 million users milestone back in November.

"Well, you've got to remember, 100 million sounds like a pretty small number to me, actually," Ballmer told BusinessWeek. "We've got a lot more Office users. And actually if you even want to go to the cloud, we have a lot of Hotmail and SkyDrive users. I'm not beating on Dropbox. They're a fine little startup and that's great."

The executive's comments come after Microsoft launched Office 2013, which allows users to save documents to SkyDrive. Ballmer, however, has had a history of bashing the competition. Back in 2007, he stressed that the iPhone will never account for a significant market share. He also criticized Android by stating that Google's mobile platform can only be used by a computer scientist.

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Last week, a U.S. Senate panel approved a privacy bill that will help keep law enforcement from accessing data stored in the cloud without a warrant.

It was a victory not only for the American web surfer who uses online email and sends personal, private messages through Facebook, but for a coalition of technology firms that have urged Congress to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to more modern 2012. The coalition, which includes technology firms Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter, have argued that consumers should have the same rights online as they do offline.

In order words, as CNET cleverly describes, law enforcement should not be able to dig through emails and private Facebook messages much like they can't search through documents stored in an office cabinet without acquiring a warrant first. To get that warrant, federal, state, and local police must  establish probable cause just like they do with offline cases.

"We have to update our digital privacy laws if we want to keep up with rapid changes in technology," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who's the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Naturally law enforcement groups, backed by Sen. Chuck Grassley, object to the idea of locking out law enforcement. Grassley tried to meet the Senate on middle ground by suggesting an amendment that would suspend privacy protections in "emergency" circumstances. That amendment was rejected, but still he persisted to argue, saying that Senators are "abdicating our duty if we do not examine the concerns raised by federal and state law enforcement."

"[Law officials have raised] important questions and ones we should be prepared to address [in an open process]", he said, "[not through] concerns that were raised in the media in the draft of the legislation that was leaked last week."

As stated, the public lashed out after a draft of the legislation proposed by Leahy was leaked, revealing that more than 22 federal agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission – would have warrantless access to e-mail and other private communications. Leahy abandoned his draft and did not offer it up for a vote, CNET said. Instead, it has been applied to a proposed amendment to the Video Privacy Protection Act which will head to the Senate for voting next year.

One of the biggest fears about the new legislation passed is that it will slow down criminal investigations. "The proposed notice provisions would create unnecessary risks to investigations and undue burdens on law enforcement agencies given the potentially large number of cases in which delays would need to be sought and renewed," stated a letter signed by the National Sheriffs' Association, the National District Attorneys' Association, and other law enforcement groups.

CNET reports that the legislation approved by the Judiciary Committee isn't a complete win for the coalition. Service providers must now inform law enforcement in advance if they plan to tell customers that they are targets of a warrant order, order or subpoena. Police can also delay notifications of being served for two 180-day periods – the original bill only allowed for two 90-day periods.

If you're reading Tom's Hardware, you're no doubt familiar with WinZip. The popular file compressing software has been a staple application for PC users for years and it still is, with over a billion downloads and 100 million active users. WinZip celebrated its best year ever in 2011, and 2012 brought WinZip for iOS and Android, as well as WinZip Mac 2. WinZip for Windows 8 will launch later on this year, and Corel is this week celebrating the launch of WinZip 17. 

Featuring integration with the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, and Sky Drive, WinZip 17 features 128- or 256-bit AES encryption along with support for OpenCL acceleration on AMD's Fusion, Trinity, and Radeon graphics, as well as Nvidia's GeForce graphics, and Intel's Ivy Bridge. It also allows you to prepare files as you share them (convert to PDF, resize images, add watermarks), send up to 2 GB via email (thanks to ZipSend, a delivery service designed to bypass limits on attachment sizes), securely share through the cloud, or share files on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

On a more personal note, our own Chris Angelini tells me that WinZip 17 will be making its debut in the Tom's Hardware testing suite next week. Chris highlighted the importance of support for OpenCL acceleration in particular.

"I have OpenCL enabled on an Nvidia GeForce GTX 680, which is a first for WinZip, and I’m getting full utilization across all cores on the chips that I’m testing, which is also something new for testing WinZip," he said. "Good news for us guys in the lab."

The Standard Edition of WinZip will set you back $30, while the Pro Edition is priced at $50. Registered users of previous versions of WinZip (WinZip 15.5 or earlier) are eligible to upgrade to WinZip 17 at 50 percent off new license prices.

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China-based Lenovo, the world's second-largest maker of personal computers, said on Tuesday that it has acquired Carmel, In.-based Stoneware Inc. for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition will help enhance and expand Lenovo's cloud computing business in both the consumer and commercial sectors by adding "significant new technologies."

"Adding Stoneware cloud computing into the Lenovo line up presents a significant opportunity to leverage their success, and enhance our PC Plus offerings, all to the benefit of our customers," said Peter Hortensius, senior vice president, and president, Product Group, Lenovo. "We have a history of innovation and embracing new technologies, and the talented team at Stoneware will fit in perfectly with our long-term strategy."

"Our cloud solutions, combined with Lenovo's award winning hardware, will provide a better experience for users in the PC Plus era," reads Stoneware's website.

The deal with Stoneware is intended to help Lenovo link its laptops and desktops with its smartphones, tablets and HDTVs it has started to manufacture thanks to its $150 million acquisition of Brazilian company CCE earlier this month. The deal is also expected to take advantage of the agreement Lenovo made with EMC Corp back in August to develop and sell network storage.

"With today’s typical technology user carrying multiple devices, the PC Plus era is here, and Lenovo is aggressively expanding its product offerings and capabilities to help people and businesses connect across any device to the content and communities that matter most to them," Lenovo said. "Customers simply want a better way to connect their PC with their tablet with their smartphone, and with Stoneware, Lenovo aims to help them get there."

According to the company, Stoneware already has several strong, highly innovative cloud products (webNetwork, LanSchool, etc) that serve millions of users primarily in education and the public sector. Lenovo said it will help extend the reach of these products as well as new offerings on a global scale while also extending this technology beyond the current strongholds that Stoneware has in government and in education into more consumer-focused offerings over time.

"We are pleased to be joining forces with Lenovo," said Rick German, CEO, Stoneware. "Lenovo is one of the largest and fastest growing technology companies in the world and for Stoneware, a small company with roots in the heartland of the United States, we are delighted to be given the opportunity to deliver real benefit to customers on a global stage."

The acquisition is not material to Lenovo's earnings, and is expected to be completed by the end of 2012. In the coming weeks, the Stoneware team, comprised of 67 employees, will be fully integrated into the Lenovo collective – there will be no job losses stemming from the acquisition. Resistance is futile.

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After much rumor, speculation, and an accidental announcement post that launched this morning on the French official Google blog (that was subsequently deleted), Google has finally made Google Drive official.

Google Drive will offer 5 GB of storage for free, 24 GB for $2.49/month, 100 GB for $4.99/month, and 1 whopping TB of storage for $49.99/month. While the 1 TB of storage doesn’t come cheap, forking over $2.49 or $4.99 a month is pocket change. You can definitely part with your morning coffee for one day to pay for that amount of cloud storage.

Google Docs will now be integrated into Google Drive and it’ll function as it previously had. You’ll still be able to edit projects in real-time with others and share projects as you see fit. You’ll also be able to comment on any type of project, be it a Word document, PDF, or image, and receive notifications for new comments.

Google Drive also features a new search function, which will allow you to not only search by filename or file type, but also by text in scanned documents. Image recognition searches will also be allowed, although Google warns that it “is still in its early stages, and we [Google] expect it to get better over time.”

In celebration of Google Drive’s launch, Gmail’s expanded every user’s free storage from 7.5 GB to 10 GB. For those that opt to use Google Drive’s paid service, their Gmail storage will automatically be bumped up to 25 GB.

Google Drive is currently available for Mac, Windows, and Android, although Google promises that iOS support is coming soon.

We've been hearing various whispers and rumors about Google Drive for years so to hear yet another rumor about the Dropbox-like service is not really at all surprising. This one comes by way of Giga Om, from Om Malik himself. Malik claims that despite the 'Boy Who Cried Wolf' feel to this topic, this time, Google Drive might really be happening.

Om cites an unnamed source that says Google will launch the service in the first week of April. According to his sources, Google is going to offer 1GB of storage space for free, with the option for users to obtain more space as long as they're willing to fork over some cash for the privilege. Google is also said to have developed an API for third party apps with this service so users can store content from other apps, too.

Google has commented beyond the usual 'we don't comment on rumors and speculation' bit, but considering April starts this coming Sunday, we're not going to be left hanging on the edge of our seats for long. There's also the fact that the Google Drive rumor is as old as the hills, so holding your breath isn't advised, anyway.

Follow @JaneMcEntegart on Twitter.