Cloud Storage Comparison: Benchmarking From Afar

First time accepted submitter fasuin writes "Which is the most advanced cloud storage solution? Which is the impact of server locations? What are the benefits of advanced techniques to optimise data transfers? Researchers from Italy and The Netherlands have come out with a set of benchmarks that allowed them to compare Dropbox, CloudDrive, SkyDrive and Google Drive. Which is the best? You can check it by yourself by running the tests on your own if you like." What this kind of benchmarking can't well do, though, is predict which of these cloud storage companies are going to be around in five years, which might be at least as an important a factor.

GlusterFS could be on this list

[purpleidea]

It's pretty awesome, and pretty cheap on $/Gb/Performance.
I'm biased because I'm the Puppet-Gluster dev.
http://ttboj.wordpress.com/puppet-gluster/ [wordpress.com]

You can run GlusterFS in "cloud" or on your own iron. Because it's not proprietary, the possibilities are endless, and it has a lot of very elegant features.

HTH
Cheers

Re:pretty sure

[fermion]

In fact when Apple moved to iCloud, it did not transfer data from Mobileme though there appeared to be no technical reason not to, and this was for paying customers. There was plenty of warning, but if data was not backed up it was gone.

Then there were all the accounts Google was deleting a couple years ago. They have never been of the tact that customer support, even for customers, is important. Getting back data is no their concern.

MS has not been in the free online data store biz for long. Yes they have some commercial offering, but they are only just entering the consumer space depends on the success of the new new Surface. Otherwise it will just be an MS Office feature. MS had no problem ending play for sure and all the customer data associated with it, which represented real money, not just easily backed up data.