The Western Digital My Cloud Review, 4 TB Edition

I’ve purchased a lot of external storage devices over the last 30 years, and the one brand I keep turning back to for future purchases is Western Digital. I’ve had rotten experiences with LaCie and Iomega in the past and, to date, I have yet to experience any sort of hardware failure — or glitch, or even momentary pause — with a Western Digital drive, and I’m hard on my storage devices.  In fact, I’ve never NOT had a LaCie drive either be dead-on-arrive or die within two weeks of setting up the device. I run my HDDs 24/7/365 and I not only expect them to work, but to thrive in all hostile environments.

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An Open Letter to Google Glasses Pioneers: Prepare to Be Punched in the Eye!

Hi there, Google Glasses Pioneer!

This is an open letter warning you to put down your Google Glasses if you care about the health of your eyes and the prosperity of your soul.  Those glasses are going to cost you a lot more than $1,500.00USD because your face is going to pay the price for prying into the public, everyday, lives of those all around you.  Nobody will trust you.  Everyone will suspect you are recording their every move — even if you are not — but because you can!  Be thankful for universal Obamacare — because you are going to need it with the rising year.  This is not a call for violence against you; this is a call out that violence will be waged against you.

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A Warning about Google Drive Local File Permissions and Web Publishing

Google Drive is one of the loves of my online life.  I store all my local files in my Google Drive Folder and that Google Drive Folder gets synced between here and the — out there — remote Google Drive.  I do all my writing and publishing via Google Drive.  I can find pretty much anything I want just by typing in a few keywords in Google Drive and I’m instantly presented with what I need.  Life is good that way!

However, I just discovered a permissions problem when it comes to using a local instance of Google Drive and a remote, third-party, website publisher, and I’ll share with you now what I learned, and how I fixed it.

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The Amazon Cloud Drive Review

Cloud Drive storage is big business.  I’m huge into hanging all my junk in the cloud.  I really like Google Drive and I also have backups to my Google Drive on SkyDrive and Amazon Cloud Drive.  The Amazon Cloud Drive is a much better service today than it was a year ago.  On my Mac, I can seamlessly upload all my iPhoto images with one click:

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Adding Paid Licenses for Google Drive in Google Apps for Business

Ever since Google Drive was announced and I upgraded my space, I’ve been enjoying enhanced speed and performance.  I’ve also been waiting for Google to take Google Drive Licenses live in the Google Apps for Business domain control panel.  This afternoon, Google Drive licenses became available for purchase with a big, yellow, box notification in my Google Apps Dashboard!

First, you have to agree to the activation conditions and confirm with Google Apps you want to add Drive licenses to your account and that’s a confusing process where you have to click on buttons to continue — and it looks like you’re adding every single Drive license to your account — but you are not.  You are merely confirming to Google that you will pay for licenses IF you decide to assign them to your users.

Google sets up the system to bill you on the first of every month, but you won’t be billed for anything until you actually assign licenses after giving Google your billing information and credit card.  It takes about 10 minutes for Google to email you and verify your billing information and to assign you a whole new “Billing ID” number number for this licensure process.  I was having horrible flashbacks to Office 365!

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Upgrading to a 200 gig Google Drive

This is my third Google Drive article in as many days, and I can’t help writing about the cloud storage service because I have been waiting so long for it to become a reality.  Last night, I did what I hoped I wouldn’t have to do for a long while:  I gave up my 80 gigs at $20 a year deal for 200 gigs for $9.99 a month!  Yes, I upgraded to a Google Drive is that four times larger than the available space on my MacBook Air SSD!

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How to Fix the "Unable to Sync" Google Drive Error

I am loving Google Drive.  I’m currently using 52% of my 80 gigs and everything is now online and properly backed up.  I did have a problem for a day that was annoying and took some sleuthing to find a fix.  If you are experiencing the greyed-out “Unable to Sync” error message, you are left to your own cure because there isn’t an official solution online from Google yet and the App itself offers no advice.  Today, I will share with you the fix I found that worked for me and might just get your Google Drive syncing again with your local Mac computer.

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