Picasa Web Album ends by 15/March/2016

While reading some tech news, bump into this announcement that Google intends to close the Picasa Web Album. I normally wouldn't be bothered about as I have not been using that service. However ever since they shutdown Google+ Photos/Album and make users switch to Google Photos, I found that new service to be lacking with many features. I liked the fact of being able to store large amount of photos online as a kind of backup as well as for viewing and searching old photos for sentimentality and for references. The missing features makes Google Photos less useful than their predecessors.

Nested Cloud Storage and NTFS Symbolic Link

Having a bunch of free cloud storage from the likes of Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box.com and many others, you could embark on a synchronization strategy to back up to your precious files up in the cloud and even give you a convenience or two.

Scrounging around the internet I found you could do some rather interesting sync and backup using the cloud storage on offer.

As of this writing, I have:

Google Drive = 15GB variable with email storage
SkyDrive = 7GB plus a free 1 year 20GB storage for being a Windows Phone user
DropBox = 2GB, can be bump up by doing various task, and recently a link from my mobile Samsung Note 2 gave me a bonus 48GB storage for two years!
Box.com = 10GB
Ubuntu One = 5GB
Amazon = 5GB
Apple iCloud = 5GB

Microsoft Outlook Live Will discontinue multiple linked account

Log in to Microsoft Outlook Live Hotmail account today and saw the message flash. It mentioned that it will discontinue the multiple linked account feature. The message didn't show again after I re-login. Looks like in the webmail world of Microsoft and Google, lots of changes were happening!

Google decided to merge the storage partition of Gmail, Drive and Google+ Photos (Picasa), which seemed rather convenient, and now Microsoft decided to disable the linked account feature, which was rather inconvenient but improved security.

In the online world, there is always this trade off between convenience versus security and they are usually mutually exclusive. If you want more convenience, you will get less security and vice versa. Knowing that black hat hackers are constantly probing and attempting to break into any online systems and email accounts, and losing your email was a big deal especially if it was your main account for banking, password recovery and other important correspondence. I suppose giving priority to security over convenience seemed like a logical choice.

Surprise! Google Drive Storage is now 15GB

This came a surprise to me when I found that I have 15 GB free Google Drive storage. However after digging around the information online and on closer inspection of my account, this was not really an increase but rather a combining of storage from the various storage. Some blogs said the Drive storage account was increased because it felt like you gained 15 GB of Google Drive / Picasa storage and 15 GB of Gmail storage. So let's look at this closer.