3 Feb 2014

Stop Google Drive

Second post of my Stop Google series.

What is it?

I don’t directly use Google Drive. But from what I understand, it’s an online data storage and synchronization service.

Alternatives

There is, of course, the ancient standard way by running your own FTP server… which is a bloated unsecure old protocol which was fine when it was created… in 1971.

You can achieve what FTP was doing and much more in a very secure way with an SSH server… but in both cases, not really user-friendly, sharing with other people can be cumbersome and synchronization is not built-in.

More recently (2007), the WebDAV protocol was released as an open standard. File versioning and sharing over the web. Some of the proprietary online data storage services I have seen are using some kind of WebDAV underneath (like OVH’s hubiC).

And the best alternative I know is ownCloud. It does a lot more than cloud storage. However, for that part it has a nice web interface, it works over WebDAV, and they provide synchronization clients for desktop and mobile phones that are better than regular WebDAV clients.

• Ultra quick WebDAV installation
• ownCloud installation