G-Drive is cloud based file system that will replace hard drives and solid state drives found in our laptops and desktops.  It will be the first cloud based filesystem and will store all of your documents in the cloud.  Computer will likely have a smaller solid state drive, or hard disk that will act as the Swap / heap / page file for the Operating system.  Basically you will only cache things locally as you need it, most of the data will be stored in the cloud.

Imagine if your entire computer was Dropboxed.  That's what I am getting at.  However, the index would go deeper than 1 folder.  It would be your entire system and would be completely customizable. 

When I watched E.P.I.C. so many years ago, I was blown away.  As I went through grad school and saw what people were doing with filesystems, databases, new internet protocols, I realized that everything in there was very possible.  This was exciting.

Quite simply :)

1.  Install G-Drive.

2.  Tell G-Drive which directories / files to sync.

3.  Wait about 3 days for the magic to happen.

4.  That's it.

All changes will be synched, all versions kept (to a degree).  In fact, as I am writing, I just noticed that Google Docs has added revisions.  This is going to happen!

Then, in the next few years when Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Google, Acer, Sony etc.  release ever smaller and lower memory footprint machines, all of the data can be accessed and cached locally using the G-Drive.  Bandwidth goes up, local storage goes down.

There are so many potential use cases for something like this, but here are a few.  Yes, they are very similiar to Dropbox.

Collaboration.    Rather than sharing / emailing files back and forth you can share folders or entire partitions of your drive with work, friends.

API endpoints.  Every media based service on the planet could use this as a media backend similiar to what Amazon has done with S3.  Google is known for good APIs and programers would love to store their stuff on the G-Drive.

Public records.  Imaging having direct access to documents / data from the internet.  The internet is a collection of webpages, G-Drive, could be a true distributed global filesystem.

Obviously the storage needs for a service like this are HUGE.  However, if anyone is going to do it, it will be Google.  Think of all the Google Apps Premium users they have, and they all have up to 25GB of mail storage plus another few GBs for documents.  That's a lot of data.  Is it possible that Google could take on our hard drives?  I honestly don't know and cannot be bothered to do the calculation, but I have a feeling that they can.  

Maybe they don't think the world is ready to hand over their hard drives to Google.  I agree.  I think a lot of people are not.  However, I do know that I would be very willing to partition my hard drive and let Google sync that to my G-Drive.  I would keep most of my documents, all of my pictures and videos along with other, big and frequently unused files.  I would also pay a lot of money for this.  I would pay $50 / month.  If they had more features, I might be willing to pay $100.

I am blessed with good bandwidth.  The office that I work out of many days of the week has a strong 17d/10u (10 MB download / sec : 10 MB upload / sec) LAN which is amazing, and at home, I opted for business internet so I get about 20d/3u (MB).  I would have no problem using G-Drive, others might not be so lucky.  However, this is changing.  Maybe Google's Fibre for Communities initiative is trying to lay the infrastructure for something like G-Drive. 

There will be problems.  Enough said.

What do you think about this?  I would use it and pay for it.  Would you? 

Dropbox, if you would like me to start working on this for you I would love to.  Let me know ;)

Thanks for listening,

Kent