Google to offer online storage?

Google maybe about to offer online storage to web users with a system that creates a mirror image of data stored on personal hard drives.

Rumours of the new service, called GDrive, emerged after a blogger found notes about the project in a slide presentation published on Google's site last Thursday.

The notes read: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)."

Google has since taken down the original PowerPoint presentation and replaced it with an Adobe Acrobat file that doesn’t include the speaker notes.

A Google spokeswoman told Web User the notes were not intended for publication and said she couldn’t release any more information.

"We are constantly working on new ways to enhance our products and services for users, but have nothing to announce at this time," she said.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has inadvertently let slip plans for Google to become the repository for "100%" of all consumer data with a service named GDrive. In the notes to a PowerPoint presentation, which were still attached to the presentation when posted on their website, Schmidt talked about 'a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power'. Where users should be able to 'house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)' and 'the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache'.

Richard Holway from technology firm Ovum, said:

"This is a further extension of the "Search across Computers" feature that Google announced a few weeks back. This allowed users to place a copy of files on Google's servers and then access them "anywhere, anyplace, anytime". The corporate reaction to this was horror as the security aspects quickly sunk in.

"But the concept is one that I have featured in my "future gazing" speeches for some years now. I constantly use a large number of devices, fixed and mobile, and spend much time trying to synchronise them. I never quite succeed. So I might be in some foreign airport working on my laptop when someone asks about an email I sent last year from my office PC. GDrive raises the prospect that I could easily locate it there and then. It also provides the ultimate backup.

"What really amuses me about Google is its naivety which produces a constant string of gaffs. I mean surely most of us have learned the hard way long ago that you really must strip out your "presenter's notes" when you distribute your PowerPoint presentations? This all comes on the back of last week's gaff by Google's CFO, who inadvertently warned that Google's growth might not continue forever at 100 per cent. True - but not exactly well handled."