Use Google Drive for collaboration

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I’ve been doing this for years. It’s fast, easy, secure, and anybody with an internet connection can do it with exactly zero effort. I’ve tested it wo
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I think Google Drive would be great for groups who don’t deal in sensitive data. For example, a church youth group might use it to collaborate on their newsletter, on events, etc. And they could use Google Docs to produce brochures and flyers.

But continuing with the church example, it wouldn’t be appropriate for the pastoral staff to use Google Drive, if they were discussing sensitive church matters.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Elly, woody

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I used to collaborate regularly with an adept astrophotographer in England. I’m in the USA. For more than a decade our activities worked like this: He captured the photons and sent stacked but otherwise unprocessed data to me. Then I did most of the image processing and sent back the resultant digital images. Several examples of our results: Rosette Nebula, Deneb and the California Nebula.

To get the several hundred megabytes of data back and forth across the pond, we would send it via Skype – this was back when Skype was truly peer to peer, and perfectly capable of transferring large datasets error-free at the speed of the sender’s uplink.

Skype was a quite natural means to do it; we chatted and spoke to one another with it. And it didn’t take a dyed-in-the-wool computer geek at both ends to operate it. Just send a file, receive a file. Easy peasy. It worked for years.

Then, a few years ago, it became impossible to send large amounts of data quickly via Skype. It would just inexplicably fail, or take hours to transfer what should have taken a few minutes. We reported problems, tried different things – to no avail. So we began to look for other means.

I set up a OneDrive shared area we could both write to and read from. That DOES work – even if neither party has the system integration of OneDrive installed, but just uses a web browser to access it.

Thing is, this is not particularly sensitive data – it’s just hobby stuff; raw astroimagery, which fairly few folks know how to process into pretty pictures – but it has always worried me that by blithely copying data to Microsoft’s site we are just “giving it to them”.

The data isn’t worth that much, though neither is it worthless. It IS copyright protected and worth something, however small – we did publish a book of astrophotography together and made a little money with it.

Microsoft – on purpose – made the process both more difficult for us, and left us with privacy concerns. As it turns out we collaborate less nowadays, in part because it’s simply not as easy or worry-free to do so.

So what happened here?

Microsoft bought a product that legitimately facilitated personal, private communications, and removed the “private” entirely, along with some of the utility of the “communications”, leaving us in the end with something that doesn’t do the same things nor provide that privacy any more. Sure, they provide “an alternative” that involves uploading things to their servers – which of course leaves them (and whomever they share data with) in control.

I’m having trouble seeing that as a positive thing. I may well switch to a Google drive for our future communications. Microsoft does not deserve to have access to a copy of our data after all that. Thanks for the suggestion, Woody.

-Noel

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Elly

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